The Power of Collectivism Theme Analysis

Japanese culture is known to be collectivist in nature, meaning that it tends to value the group over the individual. The group narration of The Buddha in the Attic reflects this in a powerful and nuanced manner, allowing the Japanese women—narrated as a collective “we”—to deliver their stories while also providing brief but impactful portraits of themselves as individuals in their community. While the reader might not always learn the names of specific Japanese women, the reader does gain an understanding of the Japanese women as a group of individuals with diverse personalities, desires, and experiences. This sense of the women develops through the narration’s stylistic use of repetition and incantatory flare, which often appears in the form of lists that provide vivid details about the women. For example, childbirth and childrearing prove to be particularly emotional experiences. Through the collective “we,” the women share that they give birth “in 113-degree heat,” “on the coldest nights of the year,” “in towns where no doctor would see [them],” and “alone, in an apple orchard.” While the reader understands that the women don’t literally experience each of these situations, the narration’s collective “we” emphasizes how the entire community of women can relate to the experience of giving birth in an unfamiliar country and without proper medical care. By underscoring this collective challenge, the novel invites readers to conceive of the women as complex people whose lives are fuller and richer than they might seem to the husbands and white bosses who diminish them.