Migrant Aesthetics by Glenda R. Carpio

Author:Glenda R. Carpio [Carpio, Glenda R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780231557023
Publisher: Columbia University Press

“AND SOME THERE BE, WHICH HAVE NO MEMORIAL”: THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC

In Emperor, Otsuka used the anonymity of her characters strategically, to guard against commodification and to strike a fine balance between historical specificity and analogical possibility. As her second novel demonstrates, Otsuka also knows that anonymity is a product of historical erasure. The protagonists in The Buddha in the Attic are “picture brides,” fictionalized versions of the many women essentially purchased from Japan by Japanese men living in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century.53 These women traveled thousands of miles from their homeland and entered into lives with men whom they had become acquainted with only through photographs and letters, most of which turned out to be forged, fake, or written by others. As Otsuka describes, they would wake up lying next to strange men “in a strange land,” in hot crowded sheds “filled with the grunts and sighs of others,” and wonder, “Does anyone even know I am here?”54 By some standards, these women went on to lead unremarkable lives—they toiled as field hands, maids, prostitutes, cooks, and nannies, raising their own children and taking care of their husbands. They left little trace behind. Most of them entered history only as inmates of the internment camps, where each bore a state-generated number.

Otsuka uses the first-person plural to tell these women’s stories; the protagonists of her novel address the reader as a collective “we.” Names and individual voices, marked by italics, wind in and out of the collective voice. This aesthetic choice seems at first to reinforce the historical obscurity to which such women have been relegated since, in the words of critic Ron Charles, “no story in the conventional sense ever develops, and no individuals emerge for more than a paragraph.”55 But Otsuka also chips away at that anonymity, starting with the first two lines 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” (3). As Mako Yoshikawa notes: “The second line suggests that the group is uniform, but the teasing phrase ‘mostly virgins’ cues us that these women resist easy categorization, and in the lines that follow, the ‘we’ becomes increasingly diverse”:56 “Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years” (3). “The diversity,” Yoshikawa points out, “is regional as well as economic and generational.”57

The novel starts on a deceptively traditional note, with immigrants arriving by boat to a new life in the United States. Yet its end point, as in Emperor, is in the internment camps. Otsuka also hints at losses that have shadowed the

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