Buddha in the Attic is an amazing book, different from any other historical fiction I have read. The reviewer below does a better job than I could, telling about the historical period and the author's writing style.
The fact that the book is so short makes the emotions that it carries even more powerful. I was able to empathize with the immigrant experience, with the life of young wives and mothers, with the prejudice toward a group of people considered to be different. And, finally, with the historical face on the internment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
This very short novel is one of the most powerful and poignant books I have ever read. It is the story of the Japanese "picture brides" who were sent to the United States in the early 20th century to marry Japanese men, who mostly needed another set of hands to do farm work and someone to warm their beds at night.
What makes this book so unusual is that it is told in the first person plural using the pronouns "we," "us," and "our" (instead of "I," as is typically done in the first person) by an unnamed narrator without named characters to populate the story. The first few sentences set the linguistic style for the rest of the novel: "On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves." The brilliance of this literary ploy is that author Julie Otsuka can better tell the sweeping, tragic story of the whole, rather than focusing on only one story that is not representative of the entire experience.
And tragic it is. Beginning with the trip on the boat from Japan to San Francisco, the story continues with the young women's first night with their new husbands, their hardworking lives doing backbreaking, exhausting labor, their birth experiences, their children, and their deportation to Japanese internment camps during World War II.
This is the heartbreaking and remarkable story of resilient young women who immigrated to a strange land without family or friends and how they gradually relinquished their native identities of self and country to become Americans—even though they were shunned and persecuted and never fully accepted.
I just read Otsuka's new book, also short, called The Swimmers, labeled as a masterpiece by reviewers. The style of The Swimmers is the same---a group narrator but giving details about lives of individuals. The first half tells about swimmers who exercise at an indoor university pool, and the effects of a crack that appears in the bottom of the pool. The second half tells about a mother's descent into dementia, as her daughter manages as best she can. It is sad and descriptive, but not sensationalized. I will love to discuss it with other readers---a beautiful book.