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

Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Come, Japanese!”

The novel begins with a group of Japanese women and girls, aged 12 to 37, on the boat to America, where they will meet their new husbands. The women’s provenance ranges widely—some are from agrarian, rural backgrounds and others have experienced the refinements of cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto. However, despite the diversity, the narrative refers to them in the first-person plural voice. The women bring a trunk with “all the things [they] [will] need for [their] new lives” (9), including “tiny brass Buddhas,” white wedding kimonos, and English phrase books. They wear pictures of their future husbands in oval lockets around their necks.

As the women endure the discomfort of traveling in steerage class and befriend each other, the chief topic of conversation is their future husbands. Professional matchmakers sent the women photographs of these young men, who are handsome and surrounded by American status symbols such as Western-style suits and Model T Fords. The women consider themselves lucky to have escaped a life of hard labor in the Japanese rice fields and think that America cannot fail to be better. Their future husbands’ letters, which describe privileges such as personal gardens to plant flowers in, contribute to this optimistic view.

While the women’s lives in Japan were sheltered and bound by rules that curtailed their freedom of speech and movement, the boat is a place for formative experiences. The inexperienced girls learn about sex from the experienced, some women have lesbian encounters, and others arrange assignations with deckhands. They also see a white person for the first time; an Englishman called Charles eagerly answers their questions about life in America.

When the women disembark, they are shocked at how difficult it is to recognize their future husbands, as the shabbily dressed men waiting for them are nothing like the ones in the photographs. Moreover, the letters they believed were from their future husbands were the work of “professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it was to tell lies and win hearts” (18).

Chapter 2 Summary: “First Night”

This chapter describes the women’s wedding nights and is written to the refrain “they took us” (19). The husbands are generally impatient to consummate their marriages in whatever inns they can afford, even though their brides “[are] still nauseous from the boat and the ground ha[s] not yet stopped rocking beneath [their] feet” (19). Still, the experiences of sex are as diverse as the women on the boat, who range from inexperienced virgins completely ignorant of the facts of life to those who have had many lovers. The men are also diverse lovers, as some are eager and violent, while others are nervous and fumbling. Overall, after being “taken” throughout the night, the women wake up feeling as though they belong to the men.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Whites”

This chapter details the work that the women have to do for white people, whom they address in the third-person plural. Contrary to what the letters promised, the women’s husbands turn out to be manual laborers rather than bankers or silk merchants. Many of the women accompany their husbands as agricultural laborers, doing back-breaking work that “no self-respecting American would do” (28). Others work in laundry-houses and as ladies’ maids to wealthy white women. The Japanese women admire their white female bosses for their bright coloring, height, and peppy attitudes, even as this contributes to their own low self-esteem.

While there are workplace conflicts—especially when the women’s English is too poor for them to communicate, or when their husbands have exaggerated their skills—the women mostly get on well with employers, who admire their discretion and impressive work ethic. Some women find that they become fetishistic objects for white men, who take them to bed in kimonos and ask them to speak Japanese during sex. Such assignations take place both in the household and in exotic-sounding brothels with names such as “Tokyo House.”

Some of the women end up staying in various Japan Towns: Japanese-majority subsections of cities where trade occurs amongst Japanese people. This allows the women to cook and eat Japanese food and find shoes in their own small sizes. They feel “safe among [their] own” (51).

While some of the women grow old with their husbands, some stray with new lovers, and others return to Japan, even as this brings disgrace to their families. Some of them dream of saving enough money to go back to Japan and imagine impressing their relatives with the tale of their American adventure. However, they stay in America “just a little bit longer” because Americans would not stand a chance of surviving without their contributions to the economy (53).

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

The first chapters of Otsuka’s novel show the émigré brides’ initial experiences of America—from the boat journey when they imagine what it will be like, to their introduction to the husbands and the life of labor that await them. These chapters introduce the first-person narrators as young women who are fresh off the boat and not yet relegated to a subordinate position in American society. In many cases, their lack of experience with America parallels their similar greenness with regard to adult life.

The naming of these women as “picture brides” is apt, as they are lured to America through photographs of intended spouses. Presented with photographs of men who “look[] like [their] brothers and fathers back home, only better dressed” and standing before symbols of Americana such as the Ford Model T (4), the women imagine that the future will be bright and comfortable. When they disembark to find that their husbands look nothing like the men in the pictures, they realize that they have fallen prey to the scams of people “whose job it [is] to tell lies and win hearts” (18). However, in the correspondence prior to the bridal couple’s meeting, both parties told lies; one young woman recalls that her husband had lied about his height, but she also pretended that she was taller. While the matchmakers sold brides and grooms to each other as though they were foolproof homogeneous products, Otsuka shows that there was great diversity in both the women’s origins and their eventual fates. For example, the matchmakers promised the men virgin brides, which was usually, but not always, the case.

In other words, even as she writes of the women as a generation who all traveled to America on the same boat, Otsuka makes it clear that they are individuals. The first-person plural voice conveys this tension between collective and individual iterations of the immigration narrative, sometimes encompassing all of the women, but mostly referring to a subset of them. For example, this passage could refer to all of the women or to small groups of them: “[O]n the boat we sometimes crept into each other’s berths late at night and lay quietly side by side, talking about the things we remembered from home” (16). However, the specificity of their memories, such as “picnics in the bamboo grove, playing shadows and demons in the crumbling temple courtyard, the day our father went out to fetch a bucket of water from the well and did not return” (16), indicates the idiosyncratic experiences of particular people.

Otsuka thus writes against the tendency to class immigrants as a unified group. This is significant, because part of what defines the women’s experiences in America is a sense of disappearing and not being seen; in the third chapter, for example, many of the women become efficient workers to the extent that they feel they are invisible. Individual narrative strands counter this trend of becoming depersonalized through work—for example, the specific references to childhood in the women’s dreams, which remind them that they were once individuals and not worker-citizens. Nevertheless, there is an irony to the fact that part of what unites the woman is the individual fear each feels of being subsumed into a collective identity (as immigrants, laborers, etc.).

While finding that America does not live up to its promise leads some of the women to fantasize about returning to Japan, what keeps them in America is the feeling that they are needed there. Since their families of origin sent the women away because they were superfluous mouths to feed, the belief that they are doing essential labor is a powerful incentive. In one sequence of questions, they imagine how they would be missed if they left the US, even wondering who would weep for their white bosses. This pride in being useful and essential causes the women to put away the ceremonial kimonos they brought with them—an act that signals they are done imagining a Japanese future for themselves.