Previous
Themes
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Buddha in the Attic, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Buddha in the Attic explores the idea that, while the entire Japanese community in the United States suffered during the years leading up to Japanese internment, Japanese women who immigrated as “picture brides” experienced a heightened amount of isolation and violence, as well as an overall lack of autonomy within their own families and homes. Although the Japanese women in the novel look forward to the beautiful lives their husbands have promised them in the United States, it becomes clear that the conditions of their marriages reflect women’s lack of autonomy in patriarchal Japanese society. The women often acquire a match based on their families’ and matchmaker’s advice and preferences, and some women’s families even marry them off due to financial troubles, reflecting how patriarchal societies view women as goods that can be traded or sold. While some of the women come from more financially privileged backgrounds, the majority felt that they couldn’t stand to be trapped in their home villages, suggesting that they ultimately ended up pursuing uncertain futures as a means of escaping otherwise stifling circumstances—even if it’s not necessarily the case that their journeys to the United States end up providing them with freedom or true autonomy. By portraying Japanese men as free to gamble, drink, and act violently toward their spouses while the women experience sexual violence and other struggles, the novel underscores the picture brides’ absence of autonomy, thus highlighting the unfortunate fact that migrating from one patriarchal society to another is a tenuous way of attaining independence or freedom.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…
Gender and Autonomy ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Gender and Autonomy appears in each chapter of The Buddha in the Attic. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire The Buddha in the Attic LitChart as a printable PDF.
Gender and Autonomy Quotes in The Buddha in the Attic
Below you will find the important quotes in The Buddha in the Attic related to the theme of Gender and Autonomy.
Chapter 1
Quotes
They were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished…They looked like our brothers and fathers back home, only better dressed, in gray frock coats and fine Western three-piece suits. Some of them were standing on sidewalks in front of wooden A-frame houses with white picket fences and neatly mowed lawns, and some were leaning in driveways against Model T Fords.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
We reached out for our mothers then, in whose arms we had slept until the morning we left home. Were they sleeping now? Were they dreaming? Were they thinking of us night and day? Were they still walking three steps behind our fathers on the streets with their arms full of packages while our fathers carried nothing at all? Were they secretly envious of us for sailing away?
Chapter 2
Quotes
They took us by the elbows and said quietly, ‘It’s time.’ They took us before we were ready and the bleeding did not stop for three days. They took us with our white silk kimonos twisted up high over our heads and we were sure we were about to die.
They took us while thinking of some other woman […] and then cursed us afterward when they could find no blood on the sheets. They took us clumsily, and we did not let them touch us again for three years. They took us with more skill than we had ever been taken before and we knew we would always want them […] They took us swiftly, repeatedly, and all throughout the night, and in the morning when we woke we were theirs.
Chapter 3
Quotes
The first word of their language we were taught was water […] ‘Learn this word,’ [our husbands] said, ‘and save your life.’ Most of us did, but one of us—Yoshiko, who had […] never seen a weed in her life—did not. She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and she never woke up.
Chapter 4
Quotes
We gave birth at five in the morning […] and that night our husband began kissing us in bed. I said to him, ‘Can’t you wait?’ We gave birth quietly, like our mothers, who never cried out or complained […] We gave birth easily, in two hours, and then got a headache that stayed with us for five years.
We gave birth but our milk never came in and after one week the baby was dead. We gave birth but the baby had already died in the womb and we buried her, naked, in the fields, beside a stream, but have moved so many times since we can no longer remember where she is.
Chapter 5
Quotes
They ate at the table like grown-ups. They never cried. They never complained. They never left their chopsticks standing upright in their rice. They played by themselves all day long without making a sound while we worked nearby in the fields…And whenever we tried to pick them up and carry them home they shook their heads and said, ‘I’m too heavy’ or ‘Mama, rest.’
They were silent, weathered men who tramped in and out of the house in their muddy overalls muttering to themselves about sucker growth, the price of green beans, how many crates of celery they thought we could pull this year from the fields. They rarely spoke to their children, or even seemed to remember their names.
