Have you had this experience? You’re driving in your car listening to a song, and you arrive at your destination. But the song hasn’t ended, and you can’t compel yourself to turn off your radio until the final note has faded away.
If so, then you have had a compressed experience of what it’s like to read Julie Otsuka’s “The Buddha in the Attic.”
The novel tells the stories of Japanese ‘picture brides’ shipped to California during the first decades of the 20th Century to marry men they knew only from their photos, which were often as inaccurate as the men’s claims of financial success. Narrated in prose that blooms poetry and music, the narrative compels the reader (certainly this reader) to follow the story to its conclusion, preferably in one sitting.
“This novel came to me in rhythm and sound,” Otsuka said at the Wilton Library on Sunday, where she discussed her novel, winner of the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction and the current Wilton Reads selection, received the Grodin Fine Writers Award, and described her writing process. At times, she said, finding the particular sounds for names became almost an obsession.
The idea for “The Buddha in the Attic” came to her while touring for her debut novel “When the Emperor Was Divine,” which follows the experiences of Japanese-Americans in California in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing. During the tour, Otuska said, readers shared stories of grandmothers who had come from Japan as brides. Their stories varied enormously when it came to where the women originated from and how their lives turned out. But one thing that seemed to remain constant was that all took a dangerous risk and underwent an arduous journey to come here. And once here, there was no going back, whether because they lacked the funds to return or because their families would not welcome them home.
“I can go days without leaving my neighborhood,” Otsuka said by way of explaining how her characters’ journey halfway across the globe differentiated them from her. Describing her life as “very quiet and predictable,” she noted that she follows the same routine every day. It begins at a café she has frequented for over two decades, where she gets a pastry, nods to the regulars, and sits in the back to read and write.
Routine is crucial to her process, Otsuka emphasized, because repetition and habit are what “allow you to get into the state of flow. You have to be able to focus for long periods of time, daydream, let your mind wander.” She also likes to read before writing because “reading takes you out of yourself,” slowing down time and putting you in “a meditative state.” Her literary inspirations include Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid, and anything featuring what she called “hypnotic prose.”
How she manages this is nothing short of a technical marvel, and here is why: Typically, the appeal and success of historical fiction is that it creates identification between then and now, between the narrator and the reader, between the familiar and the strange. But “The Buddha in the Attic” never quite closes the gap between reader and subject (until the last chapter) and doesn’t particularly seem to want to, which makes sense after hearing Otsuka speak about her relationship to her characters and her past. Her mother, uncle, and grandmother spent the war years at “Camp,” though the implications of this only began to unspool after her mother was diagnosed with dementia. The original "Buddha in the Attic" was left behind by her mother before the forced evacuation.
I suspect we’re never meant to identify with Otsuka’s “we” as much as we’re meant to have our minds opened to what it would be like to step into a world turned upside down with no way out. And Otsuka accomplishes this extraordinarily well without ever losing me as a reader.
Like her novel, Otsuka spoke in poetry and rhythm, mesmerizing in speech as she does on paper. I recommend reading her novel when you have a three-to-five hour window of open space and time, preferably in one breathless burst.