The Buddha in the Attic Study Guide

Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American author who was born and raised in California. As an undergraduate, she studied art at Yale University and then pursued a career as a painter. Fifteen years later, she earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia University, and in 2002, she published her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine, which won the Asian American Literary award, among other accolades. Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, was published in 2011 and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and France’s Prix Femina Étranger, in addition to other awards.

The young Japanese women at the center of The Buddha in the Attic are a community of “picture brides”—women who, during the early 1900s, were married off to immigrant workers living along the American West Coast and in Canada, Hawaii, and Brazil. While the novel focuses on Japanese picture brides, brides of other ethnicities existed as well. Through the concept of the picture bride, male immigrant workers—who largely worked as cheap laborers on sugarcane plantations—were able to be matched with and sent a bride from their home country, with a matchmaker and the woman’s family facilitating the process. Many women fell victim to becoming a picture bride due to their families’ financial struggles, while others believed they would gain freedom and new opportunities in America. The novel also deals with the internment of Japanese people during World War II, a policy spearheaded by Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1942 to 1945. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 into effect, which displaced approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent—the majority being American citizens—and incarcerated them in 10 major internment camps. Similar policies targeting Japanese people then came about in Canada and Latin America, all with the stated intent of protecting their respective countries from potential Japanese espionage.

Otsuka’s historical fiction highlights the stories of Japanese Americans during World War II. Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, more directly explores the experience of Japanese internment by following a Japanese American family that faces incarceration. Published in 2022, Otsuka’s third novel, Swimmers, also explores the tragic memory of Japanese internment from the perspective of a woman battling dementia. Another novel that explores Japanese internment is Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, which sheds light on the experiences of Japanese Canadians who also faced incarceration during World War II. In Journey to Topaz, an illustrated book for younger audiences, Yoshiko Uchida portrays an 11-year-old Japanese girl’s time in Topaz, the same camp in which Otsuka’s family spent three years.