Following her highly acclaimed first novel When the Emperor was Divine, Julie Otsuka's second novel The Buddha in the Attic - winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction 2012 - tells a powerful story of a group of Japanese immigrants on their journey to America for marriage. Between the wars a group of young, non-English-speaking Japanese women travelled by boat to America. They were picture brides, clutching photos of husbands-to-be whom they had yet to meet. Julie Otsuka tells their extraordinary, heartbreaking story in this spellbinding and poetic account of strangers lost and alone in a new and deeply strange land. In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.
Julie Otsuka is the author of the bestselling novel When the Emperor was Divine, she is the recipient of an Asian American Literary Award, an American Library Association Alex Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. The Buddha in the Attic was nominated for the 2011 National Book Award.
You need to log in to Rate the book
Review
Sweeping, symphonic, empathic . . . subtle, infinitely skilful . . . an exhilarating, compulsive read. Otsuka's haunting, heartbreaking conclusion, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, is faultless ― Daily Mail
Paints a poignant, moving portrait of immigration by deftly weaving together a chorus of voices. Fascinating and tragic in equal measure ― Easy Living
A tender, nuanced, empathetic exploration of the sorrows and consolations of a whole generation of women ― Telegraph
A haunting and heartbreaking look at the immigrant experience . . . Otsuka's keenly observed prose manages to capture whole histories in a sweep of gorgeous incantatory sentences ― Marie Claire
Novels written in the first person plural are rare. It's a narrative device that gives The Buddha in the Attic a deliciously melancholy quality . . . Powerful, lyrical and almost unbearably sad ― Psychologies
Powerfully moving . . . intensely lyrical . . . verges on the edge of poetry ― Independent
The tone is often incantatory, and though the language is direct, unconvoluted, almost without metaphor, its true and very unusual merit lies, I think, in that indefinable quality we call poetry -- Ursula Le Guin ― Guardian
A kind of collective memoir that squeezes volumes of experience into a small space . . . more than a history lesson because Otsuka compresses the individual emotions into one haunting story ― The Times
Her trick is to sum up a few life story in a few tantalising sentences, moving on to the next at lightning speed. The result is panoramic, each line opening a window on to the world of one woman after another, pinpointing each one's hopes and happiness or misery and pain ― Sunday Express
Intriguing . . . fleeting, singular images pile up and reverberate against each other to strange, memorable effect ― Metro
Spare but resonant, powerful, evocative ― The New York Times Book Review
Spare and stunning . . . Otsuka has created a tableau as intricate as the pen strokes her humble immigrant girls learned to use in letters to loved ones they'd never see again ― Oprah Magazine
A delicate, heartbreaking portrait . . . beautifully rendered . . . Otsuka's prose is precise and rich with imagery. [Readers] will finish this exceptional book profoundly moved. ― Publishers Weekly
This chorus of narrators speaks in a poetry that is both spare and passionate, sure to haunt even the most coldhearted among us ― Chicago Tribune
A stunning feat of empathetic imagination and emotional compression, capturing the experience of thousands of women ― Vogue
A lithe stunner ― Elle
To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird ― The New York Times on When the Emperor was Divine
