Julie Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, the story of Japanese picture brides who came to the United States in the early twentieth century, begins with a simple, provocative line: “On the boat we were mostly virgins.” The “we” continues throughout the book as a choral narrative voice that speaks for a group of women, aged twelve to thirty-seven, who are never identified as individual characters. What unites them is their hopeful journey to a foreign land where arranged marriages to men known only through photographs await them.
“They had no idea what they were in for,” says Otsuka, who has been researching and writing this novel, published by Knopf in August, for the past nine years, since her first book, When the Emperor Was Divine, was published by Knopf in 2002. “They only heard stories about the good life in America. The encounter was very unexpected, starting off with meeting their husbands, who might not be eighteen, as their pictures suggest, but forty-five, not wealthy but poor migrant workers. So their marriages started out with betrayal.”
Otsuka knew early on that she wanted to write about the tens of thousands who emigrated from Japan as picture brides, though she began with one individual telling her story. Then, she says, she realized that the opening line, which “was tucked away in the middle of all this text,” was not only the right way to begin but it also defined the form the novel would take. “I wanted to tell everyone’s story, and this voice let me weave in these emerging ‘I’s,” Otsuka says. “Another reason it made sense is that the Japanese are communal people, very group oriented. There was something joyous, almost ecstatic, about the ‘we’ voice. I think of it being more like a song.”
The result is a powerful narrative told from the perspective of women who left an impoverished country to come to a prosperous one, where even marriage could not protect them from the racism and xenophobia that would eventually lead to the internment during World War II of Japanese Americans in so-called relocation camps. The granddaughter and daughter of survivors of these camps, Otsuka seems a natural to tell this story, but it took her a while to see herself as a fiction writer at all, let alone one who could write about something so important to her family’s history.
Born in 1962 in Palo Alto, California, Julie Otsuka grew up in what looked from the outside like a traditional middle-class family. Her father, who was born in Japan and came to the United States on a student visa in 1950, when he was twenty-four, was an aerospace engineer; her mother was a lab technician who stopped working to raise her daughter and two sons. The family moved to Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles, when Otsuka was nine. She says she was a “nerd” in high school, active in student council and senior class president. She entered Yale University intending to study history, but she surprised herself—and her parents—with a newfound passion for painting. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art in 1984. She spent a few years waitressing while building up her portfolio, and entered an MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington, which she left after three months. She relocated to New York City, supported herself as a temp doing word processing, took some art courses in a nondegree program—and then quit. Otsuka explains rather matter-of-factly that she “failed” as a painter; she simply could not get what was in her head onto the canvas.
For three years she worked nights, and found both solace and inspiration reading fiction, having discovered an affinity for the novelists she calls her “outdoor guys”: Ernest Hemingway, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy. To amuse herself and her boyfriend, she began writing what she says were “comic sketches,” which proved more than a humorous distraction when they earned her admission to Columbia University’s MFA program in 1994. Her thesis was composed of what would become several chapters of her debut novel.
In the acknowledgments section of When the Emperor Was Divine, Otsuka cites Maureen Howard, one of her professors at Columbia, “for her early encouragement and support.” Otsuka says when she began writing about the Japanese internment in Howard’s workshop, it was the first time she had written anything other than humorous short stories. She credits Howard with recognizing their worth as fiction as well as their importance to Otsuka. “She read two stories—that later became the first and second chapters of Emperor—and encouraged me to keep writing about this family and the war. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have considered those two stories the aberration they then seemed to be—they seemed to have come out of nowhere, but clearly, at some deep unconscious level, I needed to write about the war. Maureen gave me the green light to keep going. Sometimes that’s all it takes, a nod, a word of encouragement.”
While The Buddha in the Attic came to Otsuka, as she says, “in the rhythm of the language,” When the Emperor Was Divine came to her in images, initially a specific one: a woman standing on a street, looking at a sign on a telephone pole that announced Executive Order 9066, issued in 1942, calling for the relocation of Japanese Americans into internment camps. Eventually one hundred twenty thousand people were held in these camps for the duration of World War II. That bit of history inspired Otsuka to write five spare and streamlined chapters, narrated by four members of an unnamed family—a mother and father and their two children—who survive the camps only to return three and a half years later to a home still hostile and mistrustful toward Japanese Americans.
When the Emperor Was Divine is dedicated to Otsuka’s parents “and in memory of Toyoko H. Nozaka,” her maternal grandmother who was interned at Topaz, Utah, with her son and daughter (Otsuka’s mother). Otsuka’s grandfather, who died when she was quite young, was arrested on December 8, 1941, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and incarcerated in various camps until 1945. His situation, Otsuka points out, was not unusual: He was a prominent businessman who worked for a Japanese import-export company, and the FBI targeted leaders of the Japanese American community. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the family eventually gained access to his file, where she says much was blacked out, though there was no evidence that he had engaged in even remotely suspicious activities.
In the late 1980s, while moving her grandmother from her house to an apartment, Otsuka’s family found a box of letters and postcards on the floor of the fireplace. Her grandfather had written these to his wife and children and sent them from various detention camps where he was imprisoned. Although they were censored and the family never located any that the grandmother had written to him, Otsuka began to piece together a story she had heard in bits and pieces. While she was growing up, her family used the camps as an occasional point of reference rather than a source or focus of anger or recriminations. Her family rarely spoke of their experience at Topaz or their return from the camp.
When the Emperor Was Divine was widely praised when it was published in 2002. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani pointed out Otsuka’s “lyric gifts and narrative poise, her heat-seeking eye for detail, her effortless ability to empathize with her characters.” Since 2003 the novel has been chosen as a campus read by over thirty colleges. It was also the community read for Boulder, Colorado; Greenwich, Connecticut; Seattle; Iowa City; Santa Barbara, California; and the statewide Vermont Reads program, among others. One reason for its popularity seems to be the parallels many see between what happened to Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the attitude toward Arab and Muslim Americans after 9/11. Whereas Otsuka’s grandfather and other Japanese Americans were classified as “dangerous enemy aliens,” the contemporary term “enemy combatant” strikes a similar chord. Campus and community reading programs often use When the Emperor Was Divine as a vehicle to question whether what most consider a disgraceful chapter in American history could happen again.
After Otsuka’s debut was published, much was made of the “fairy-tale” story that Otsuka’s agent had given the manuscript of When the Emperor Was Divine to a Random House editor on a Friday, and by Monday Otsuka was given an attractive offer by Random House imprint Alfred A. Knopf. That is, in fact, a true story, but what usually gets left out of the telling is that Otsuka had worked on that manuscript for more than six years before she gave it to her agent. Similarly, The Buddha in the Attic has been nearly a decade in the making. But Otsuka doesn’t worry about a pace that many would consider painfully slow. “I really like the act of writing; it’s the same as painting in that I become engaged in the process of making stuff. What I love is the form and language. Each paragraph is like a puzzle.”
Otsuka, who supports herself through her writing and speaking engagements, follows a specific writing routine because, as she says, “I’m very much a creature of habit.” Most mornings she does research, “reading source books and taking notes in large Clairefontaine notebooks with graph-paper pages. I love these notebooks because the paper is thick, and you can write on both sides without the ink showing through.” Several days a week she goes to the gym to swim or lift weights. Then, it’s off to “her” café.
Ever since the early nineties, when she needed time to regroup, Otsuka has gone to the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights near Columbia University. She begins by reading fiction. “The act of reading focuses my brain, calms it down, opens it up, makes me more receptive,” she says. “I like that there’s no music in the café. I prefer the silence or ambient white noise of people talking. Ideally, when I’m writing, I’m in a very meditative state. I can’t always get there, but there’s something about the ritual of going to the café every day and sitting in the same corner—my favorite table, in the back.”
Unlike the local Starbucks, this café does not have outlets to plug in laptops—Otsuka wouldn’t need one anyway. She used to write with a Waterman fountain pen but says she gave it up for pencils, the better to erase as she continuously revises, word by word, line by line. She writes in longhand on the back of loose sheets of paper (she likes to recycle), then goes home to type up changes on the computer and print out a copy to take with her to the café the next day. The process apparently works. Otsuka reports that she seldom gives a manuscript to anyone to read until it is complete, and once she submits it to her agent and editor, changes are minimal, rarely structural.
In both of her novels, Otsuka excavates and explores her personal Japanese heritage within a larger historical context. Her family has only distant relatives in Japan, in the mountains outside of Tokyo, and they have little contact even today. The summer after her freshman year at Yale, she went to Japan after studying the language in intensive workshops. She has not been back. Acknowledging that she and her mother experienced the “usual mother-daughter conflicts,” she describes her first book as a way of trying to figure out what happened to her mother during the war and how that experience formed her: “There was so much silence in my family about what happened during World War II, and a lot of repressed anger and sadness, too, so writing the novel helped me to understand what that silence was all about.” Researching and writing the second novel has, she says, given her a deeper understanding of the reticence and reluctance to stand out that is a hallmark of Japanese culture, an understanding that has brought her and her father, who still lives in California, closer. (Her mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.)
A fascination with the related notion of fate—of accepting the cards you’ve been dealt and making the best of it—is part of what drew Otsuka to the picture brides. In her new, slim novel, Otsuka focuses each chapter on the women’s common experience in the “invisible world,” as she describes their existence in America. She says that she floundered for about a year after When the Emperor Was Divine came out, knowing she wanted to write about the picture brides, but remaining uncertain of the form. She knew the book would start on a boat, and she eventually focused each chapter on the picture brides’ shared experiences and the public history that enfolds the lives of the issei, or first generation Japanese immigrants.
Initially she didn’t think her second novel would extend to World War II and the camps, but, she says, the process took her there again: “It seemed there was a story left over, unfinished business from the first book—the disappearance. I always wondered what the white townspeople thought after their neighbors were gone. When I was traveling and talking about the first book, I often met people who were alive during World War II on the West Coast, and someone would say, ‘There was a Japanese girl who sat next to me in class, and then she was gone.’ What did the parents or teachers of the white children tell them? How did people process the disappearance of their neighbors?” Otsuka remembers her mother saying that when she returned to Berkeley from the camp, no one from her school asked where she’d been for three and a half years.
Otsuka wrote the last chapter long before the novel was finished, but continued to believe it would be “the perfect ending, a kind of twist.” It’s a different choral voice—that of the white townspeople who wonder where the Japanese have gone. The mayor tells them, “The Japanese are in a safe place,” and assures them that they “have left us willingly…without rancor; per the President’s request.” Ultimately, their absence is forgotten: “With each passing day the notices on the telephone poles grow increasingly faint. And then, one morning, there is not a single notice to be found, and for a moment the town feels oddly naked, and it is almost as if the Japanese were never here at all.”
It’s a risky ending, but it’s a risk that in some ways Otsuka has taken before. The ending of When the Emperor Was Divine was a “twist” also, as the father of the family indicts with bitter sarcasm the racism and xenophobia that destroyed so many lives. Otsuka says that her agent and editor warned her that if the book would be criticized, it would be for the final chapter, and they were right. Kakutani, for one, called this final chapter a “shrill diatribe” that lacked the “subtle, emotional power” of the rest of the novel. But even now, nine years later, Otsuka stands firm: It is the right ending.
The Buddha in the Attic ends with a similar, though perhaps more understated indictment of that same chapter of American history. Filled with speculations, haunting images of Japanese culture, litanies of names of places and people, and vague recollections, the final chapter offers no forgiveness for those whose silence made them complicit: “And after a while we notice ourselves speaking of [the Japanese] more and more in the past tense. Some days we forget they were ever with us, although late at night they often surface, unexpectedly, in our dreams.” Otsuka says she believes that “nobody really wanted to know” what happened, but in her first novel and now in The Buddha in the Attic, she insists on the urgency of that knowing, however belatedly.
So while most are thinking of Japan in terms of the recent earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, perhaps listening admiringly to reports that there was no looting, no lamenting of the unfairness of the triple disaster, but instead a communal resolve to accept the situation and move forward, Otsuka offers a parallel narrative from another time that is both a tribute to this same community and a reminder of where prejudice and fear can lead. She won’t let us forget this chapter in the history books, this episode of America’s polyglot culture, this Buddha in the attic.
Renée H. Shea, professor of English and modern languages at Bowie State University in Maryland, has written profiles of Sandra Cisneros, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Monique Truong, among others, for Poets & Writers Magazine. She is coauthor of the book Literature and Composition: Reading, Writing, Thinking (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2010).