The Buddha In The Attic

Geschreven bij Buddha In The Attic

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Geschreven bij The Buddha In The Attic

This moving book is the story of thousands of Japanese girls and women sold by their poor families in the early 1900's to marry Japanese in the US. Many suitors were not as young or successful as they claimed to be: most were farm workers, moving in time with crop harvests.
JO cleverly selected and edited a mountain of written documentation into chronological chapters: (1)`The sea voyage', whose opening sentence is "On the boat most of us were virgins". (2)`First night` opens with "Our new husbands took us quickly", (3)`Whites' deals the USA; (4) `Babies' with mothering while working in the fields or in another capacity, (5)`The children' with more of the same, but with the first generational conflicts emerging.

This makes up over half of this 129-page book. It is arranged in chapters which read like litanies in hauntingly-repetitious sentences describing individual experiences. On page 72, still in chapter 5, the book's focus shifts: "One by one all the old words we had taught them began to disappear from their heads. They forgot the names of the flowers in Japanese. They forgot the names of the colors". And so on.

A few more chapters follow, because the 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed the lives of Japanese living along the US West Coast. It began with curfews, travel restrictions, followed by deportations of men, then women and children to Rocky Mountain states. To render this alleged fifth column incapable to use flashlights to guide Japanese invaders onshore, poison reservoirs, food, or whatever... Of course their fate was not as fatal as that of another minority in a far bigger campaign in Europe. The Japanese-Americans survived their incarceration. One question remains: how did they fare once released ?

Brilliant and winner of the 2012 PEN/Faulkner award.