We knew how to pull weeds and chop kindling and haul water, and one of us - the rice miller’s daughter - knew how to walk two miles into town with an eighty-pound sack of rice on her back without once breaking into a sweat. We knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours, saying absolutely nothing of substance at all. Most of us on the boat were accomplished, and were sure we would make good wives. The book begins with the guarded optimism of the brides-to-be venturing toward their linked but disparate fates:

Combining epic sweep with telling detail, she recovers these women’s sacrifices, their American lives, and the memories they left behind in a narrative that is wistful, elegant, and, in the end, perhaps deliberately unsatisfying. Otsuka writes in the unusual first-person plural, interspersed with apparent quotations from historical and autobiographical sources. Often relying on outdated or otherwise deceptive photographs and letters, they left everything they knew in order to wed Japanese laborers and farmers they had never met. Her short, precise, poetic novel, nominated for the 2011 National Book Award, aims to correct this melancholy situation for one such forgotten group - the Japanese “picture brides” who journeyed to California in the early twentieth century. Julie Otsuka ’99SOA opens The Buddha in the Attic with an epigraph from the apocryphal biblical work Ecclesiasticus: “And some there be, which have no memorial who are perished, as though they had never been.”

Book the buddha in the attic