“The Buddha in the Attic”
by Julie Otsuka.
Knopf. 129 pages. $22.
They came here, worked for, or with, Americans, raised families and then were taken away to camps, lost to their former neighbors. Thousands of Japanese moved to the United States in the first half of the 20th century, and it is their stories that spill out of Julie Otsuka’s poetic novel, “The Buddha in the Attic.”
It seems presumptuous to claim to tell the stories of an entire culture in one thin volume, but Otsuka succeeds in doing so with a graceful simplicity.
The story begins with the women — the poor, the rich, the beautiful, the homely, the young and the widowed all herded onto boats headed to America. They hope for the best and fear the worst as they set sail toward arranged marriages with unknown Japanese men who had settled in this new land.