"Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore we could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine."
This passage may give a clue as to how Julie Otsuka's book is to be read. She calls it a novel. It is closely and carefully based on factual history/ies. There are novelistically vivid faces, scenes, glimpses, voices, each for a moment only, so you cannot linger anywhere or with anyone. Information is given, a good deal of it, in the most gracefully invisible manner; and history is told. Yet the book has neither a novel's immediacy of individual experience, nor the broad overview of history. 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.
Writing a long narrative in the first-person plural is a risky business. It brings up questions that don't come to mind with the familiar first or third person singular. For one thing, the reader identifies easily with an "I" narrator or a "he/she" protagonist, and though some critics sneer at sympathetic identification and some novelists delight in frustrating it, it remains a fundamental element of the pleasure of story. But it's hard to identify strongly with a whole group, even if one is interested in it as a group, and even if its members are individually sympathetic.
And "we" sets up two groups: We and They/You. Some languages make a distinction between the inclusive "we", meaning "I and all of you", and the restrictive "I and others not including you". The "we" of The Buddha in the Attic is an artificial literary construct that does not include an "I". The people supposed to be speaking are Japanese "picture brides" of the early 20th century. Women married by proxy to Japanese men working in the United States were shipped across the Pacific to husbands whom they had seen, and who had seen them, only in photographs. The arrangement was made for men who had no other way to get a wife and for women, mostly young and very poor, who hoped for a better life in golden California. The practice was continued for some decades; Otsuka's group appears to have come over shortly after the first world war.
The picture brides had no way to know that American racial prejudice would isolate them with their husbands and that for the rest of their lives they would be "we" only to one another, we the Japanese in America, we the Nisei. To white Americans they would always be Them. That is Otsuka's justification for telling the story in an unusual and difficult way, and it is a powerful one. Also effective: it makes the point without stating the point.
On the ship, travelling in steerage, the women form a group, however disparate. When they get to the promised land, they are scattered, each to her husband, and the husbands are emphatically "they", not "we": "That night our new husbands took us quickly. They took us calmly. They took us gently, but firmly, and without saying a word They took us flat on our backs on the bare floor of the Minute Motel They took us before we were ready and the bleeding did not stop for three days."
Later, as their hard, poor lives go on, slaving at "stoop labour" in the fields of California, working in the kitchens of the labour camps or of middle-class employers, even the absolute otherness of the whites can't reconnect them with their husbands. Even when their children are born, though at first they are very close, always, heartbreakingly, they are "them" not "us".
"In early summer, in Stockton, we left them in nearby gullies while we dug up and sacked onions and began picking the first plums. We gave them sticks to play with in our absence and called out to them from time to time to let them know we were still there. Don't bother the dogs. Don't touch the bees. [] And at the end of the day when there was no more light in the sky we woke them up from wherever it was they lay sleeping and brushed the dirt from their hair. It's time to go home."
Before long, as the children grow taller than their fathers, forget their Japanese and will speak only English, eat hugely, drink milk, dump ketchup on potatoes, become ashamed of their parents and will not bow to them, the gap widens "with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp". The children are joining the Others, the white Americans. But then comes the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Otsuka tells of the months of increasing hostility and suspicion that Japanese Americans lived through, their fear, their incredulity, before they were summarily dispossessed and deported to detention camps as enemy aliens. In its agonised poignancy and restraint, this may be the finest passage of the book.
I am sorry that after it, in the last chapter, she suddenly changes her narrative mode and ceases to follow her group of women. The point of view changes radically and "we" suddenly are the whites: "The Japanese have disappeared from our town."
I was 12 when "the Japanese disappeared" from my town, Berkeley. My unawareness, my incomprehension of the event at the time, has troubled and informed my mind for many years. It's up to me, as a white American, to deal with it now. But Otsuka can't do it for me, and I only wish she had gone all the way with her heroines into the exile from exile: those bitter desert and mountain prison-towns, where few of "us" went even in imagination, until those who returned bore witness.
Ursula K Le Guin's Lavinia is published by Phoenix.
