The Buddha in the Attic

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Character Analysis

Early 20th-Century Picture Brides

The term “picture bride” refers to the Japanese women who, with the assistance of professional matchmakers, came to America to marry single men from the Japanese diaspora. The name references the misleading photographs of future husbands the matchmakers used to lure the women to America. In reality, these women traveled on multiple boats to US Pacific ports in San Francisco and Hawaii, but Otsuka condenses this phenomenon into the experiences of women on a single voyage. This renders the heterogeneous group of women, who range from “delicate and fair” Kyoto girls who have “lived [their] entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house” to “farmers’ daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders” (7), into a generational group who have enough in common to speak in a first-person plural voice. Otsuka enhances this impression by portraying the voyage as a community of women who influence each other through the exchange of stories and advice. However, the novel also juxtaposes the women’s universal experience of mentally preparing for life in America with the idiosyncratic thoughts and actions of individuals. For example, there are women who subvert the norm by sexually experimenting with each other, and others who arrange secret assignations with boathands. These unnamed exceptions remind the reader that the women are a group of distinct individuals who will always have the capacity to subvert expectations.

The motif of a general trend and individual transgressive acts also characterizes the women’s lives in the patriarchal structures of their marriages and families of origin. For example, most women have internalized a state of obedient discretion epitomized by the maxim, “[A] girl must blend into a room: she must be present without appearing to exist” (6). However, not all of the women adhere to this rule—for example, the sexually-experienced exotic dancer who tells her virginal co-voyagers about what to expect on their wedding nights.

Once in America, the women channel what they have learned in their families of origin into becoming productive and obedient wives and workers. This leads to them feeling so divorced from their true selves that although they are physically present, they fear that “[their] soul[s] ha[ve] died” (37). Nevertheless, the majority learn small ways of reclaiming their individuality. They turn a tomato crate into a Buddhist altar or buy a tube of lipstick that helps them aspire towards Hollywood glamor. Some exceptions escape the system that the matchmakers destined for them, whether by working as prostitutes in a brothel, leaving their husbands for other men, or having affairs with the masters of the houses they work in. While these options keep the women firmly within the service of men, they indicate a strain of protest within a group of women who have been stereotyped as obedient and discreet. This protest against an unfair and exploitative system that uses Japanese women for their labor and gives them little in return is most obvious in the woman who commits suicide by “fill[ing] the sleeves of her white silk wedding kimono with stones and wander[ing] out into the sea” (47). Here, dressed in her wedding garment, the woman symbolically drowns not only her body but also the false promises that led her away from Japan. The women who “say a prayer for her every day” do not judge her (47), as they acknowledge that they share in her protest and wish for her (and by extension themselves) to find peace.

At the end of the novel, when the women are preparing to leave for the internment camps, they reach peak individuality as Otsuka names them and describes their unique stories. For example, “Tsugino left with a clear conscience after shouting a long-held and ugly secret down into a well. I filled the baby’s mouth with ashes and it died” (108). This confession of infanticide is one of many details that show how the now middle-aged women are weathered individuals whose experiences in America have fundamentally changed them. This journey to the internment camps parallels the original boat journey and gives the women a context in which to study each other and compare how their lives have turned out. More than ever, they see that while they are traveling together, they all have irrepressible distinctions.

The Husbands

As a collective, the husbands do not live up to what the matchmakers promised. While the pictures given to the women show handsome young men parading before Western status symbols such as Ford Model T cars, the women’s first glimpse of reality is a “crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats” who “bear no resemblance” to their photographs (18). The women speculate that the photographs were taken 20 years earlier, and that the letters, written in the much-appreciated Japanese status symbol of good handwriting, were professionally crafted. Thus, the men the women came to America to marry were an artificial construct. Some of the women dream of these fantasy men long after they are married to their real husbands, believing that they are somewhere out there waiting for them.

While the men are united in being a disappointment to the women, the details of this disappointment vary. For example, the San Francisco lodgings the men procure for their wedding nights either disappoint by being shabby (indicating that the man is poor) or by being the best that an Asian person can expect in a country ruled by racist white people. As lovers, they disappoint in numerous ways—either through sadistic practices that intimidate their virgin brides, or through the fumbling technique and premature ejaculation of sexual inexperience. However, this moment when the men most exude power over their wives is also the one where they are at their most vulnerable. For example, the inexperienced men “[take] [the women] shyly, and with great difficulty, as they tr[y] to figure out what to do. ‘Excuse me,’ they sa[y]. And, ‘Is this you?’ They said, ‘Help me out here’” (21). The numerous hesitations indicate that the men are bewildered by the unknown territory of a woman’s body after years of celibacy. The woman is something that the man must acclimatize to, just as he got used to life in America.

The men, who are less individuated than the women, collectively perform the rituals of patriarchy even as they are conscious of being second-class citizens in America—a country where the majority of women are taller than them and Japanese immigrants are unable to own property. In leaving childcare to the women and insisting that they have sex even when they are exhausted, the men try to be patriarchs in the style of their fathers. However, following the Pearl Harbor attack, they are the ones most likely to be charged with being spies and the first ones drafted onto the list. Their control over their lives is now limited to the clothes they pack for an unexpected departure. While they left Japan to escape poverty, America has not granted them the freedom to rise from it. Ironically, the women, who have long complained that their husbands take them for granted, grow sympathetic towards them just at the moment they are about to lose them. While the husbands are not the romantic figures the women dream of, they give them a sense of security.

The Nisei Children

The women’s children are Nisei, a term that refers to the first generation born in the United States to Japanese parents. From the time they are laid down “gently, in ditches and furrows and wicker baskets […] at the edges of the fields” where their parents work (60), the Nisei grow up cooperative and accepting of the fact that their needs come second to those of their mothers’ white employers. The women raise the Nisei to look after the family’s good above their own, enlisting them in work as soon as they can. While some of the women admire their daughters’ quietness and obedience, most place their hopes in their sons’ ability to own land and provide for them. This causes them to treat their sons better than their daughters.

However, when the Nisei go to school with English-speaking children, they begin to have their own dreams. They want lifestyles that are different from their parents’ servile fates. Some form trouble-making gangs, while others excel at school and hope to rise through the American system, even as they are aware that it is weighted against people of color. In order to align with America, they distance themselves from their parents by becoming louder and by speaking English at the expense of Japanese. Thus, parents and children become foreigners to each other, only joining forces when they are mandated to do so by the government that interns them. Even so, the sons’ singing of the Berkeley fight song and the daughters’ wearing of American flag pins indicate that regardless of America’s crimes against them, the children’s education has conditioned them to align with the nation.

White People

In Otsuka’s novel, the women’s white bosses and neighbors hold the balance of power. Some of them are outwardly racist, performing violent acts against Japanese people’s property and calling them names, but most are more subtly racist; they participate in a system that overworks Asian people while paying them meagerly and not granting them true equality. Although the patriarchy dictates that the immigrant women are subservient to the men they have married, in many cases the women’s necessary devotion to their labor positions the white bosses as their true husbands. In the manner of traditional husbands, the white bosses determine the women’s allowance, privileges, and punishments.

A mutually dependent dynamic develops, especially between the Japanese women who work as maids and their white mistresses. White and Japanese women admire and exoticize each other. For example, the Japanese women admire that their white mistresses can teach them such essential skills as frying eggs and talking persuasively to husbands. The white women become both objects of admiration and causes of low self-esteem amongst Japanese women, typically for one and the same reason: “[T]hey had a confidence that we lacked. And much better hair. So many colors. And we regretted that we could not be more like them” (39). In turn, the white women “marvel[] at [the Japanese American women’s] tiny figures and [their] long, shiny black hair. They praise[] [them] for [their] hardworking ways […] They claim[] to like [the women] much more than they did any of the others” (40). Crucially, the women realize they are better liked and respected than those from other non-white groups—for example, the Black scullery maids who are kept below stairs.

However, the notion that Japanese people enjoy better treatment than other minorities is counterbalanced by white people’s objectification of them. This is evident in the way the white women change their Japanese maids’ names to ones like “Lily,” objectifying them by comparing them to flowers or other decorative artifacts. When one maid falls pregnant, the white boss dismisses her for straying from the dainty image of the perfect Japanese maid. Ultimately, the white people see their Japanese employees as disposable; after just a year of the internment camps opening, white America has already grown used to life without its Japanese citizens.