Lost in the Passage
85
Feminist Studies in English Literature
Vol.21, No. 3 (2013)
Lost in the Passage: (Japanese American) Women
in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic
JaeEun Yoo
(Hanyang University)
As is widely known, traditional psychoanalysis theorizes the
mother-daughter relationship in negative terms; in order to grow
into a mature individual, the daughter must sever emotional ties
with her mother. As Marianne Hirsch writes, “a continual allegiance
to the mother appears as regressive and potentially lethal; it must be
transcended. Maturity can be reached only through an alignment
with the paternal, by means of an angry and hostile break from the
mother” (168). However, precisely because the mother-daughter
relationship is conceptualized in this way—that is, as the site of
intergenerational female alienation, many women writers have tried
to re-imagine it as a source of strength and encouragement, though
often not without conflict.
Asian American feminist writers are no exception. Reconceiving and restoring the mother-daughter relationship is even
more complicated for Asian American writers as they face issues of
race in addition to those of gender. Critics have long noticed the
specific way these writers imagine Asian American daughters’
JaeEun Yoo
86
attempts to relate to and draw from their immigrant mothers—a
relationship conventionally thought of as unbridgeable due to
generation gap and culture differences. As Melinda Luisa De Jesus
points out, “what U.S. third world feminist writers have added to
this genre [Mother/daughter stories] is the delineation of how
women of color of all generations must negotiate not only sexism in
American society but its simultaneous intertwining with racism,
classism, heterosexism, and imperialism” (4). Recognizing the fact
that their mothers also suffer from the double yoke of gender and
racial discrimination, Asian American female writers tend to focus
more on the difficult but necessary communication with and
connection to the mother. In these writers’ works, for an Asian
American daughter to grow up as a mature individual, she must
both differentiate herself from and identify with the mother. Traise
Yamamoto, writing specifically about Japanese American female
writers, argues that “agency and connection are crucial aspects of the
mother-daughter relationship for Japanese American women: the
necessity for identification with the mother relates to issues of
survival and resistance,” because “the structure of racialized
motherhood suggest that the mother is a crucial figure for
enculturating the daughter in modes of material and psychological
survival in a social realm where she will be defined by both her race
and gender” (145).
In this relatively short but significant tradition of Asian
American writing, Julie Otsuka’s recent novel, The Buddha in the Attic
(hereafter, The Buddha), stands out. The novel emphasizes the break,
rather than connection, between Japanese American mothers and
their daughters. Despite a strong attachment to their mothers,
Lost in the Passage
87
Japanese picture brides in The Buddha are separated from them by
paternal authority and physical distance. They become mothers in
America, but instead of being a source of inspiration and strength,
the alienation they experience from their daughters renders them
helpless. Although they know their Nisei daughters will never fulfill
their hope of full assimilation into American society, they cannot but
watch their futile dream.
The Buddha is unique in another and related sense. Before
Otsuka published her previous novel, When the Emperor Was Divine,
most Japanese American works that deal with World War II
internment were based on the writer’s own experience. These
autobiographical works display a peculiar characteristic that Selwin
Cudjoe notes about African American autobiography. Analyzing
Maya Angelou’s texts, Cudjoe argues that they are set in “a much
more im-personal condition, the autobiographical subject emerging as
an almost random member of the group, selected to tell his/her tale….
[Writing an autobiography is] a public rather than a private gesture,
me-ism gives way to our-ism and superficial concerns about individual
subject give way to the collective subjection of the group” (9, italics
original). Shirley Geok-lin Lim also identifies a paradox common to
Japanese American autobiographical writing as follows: “Even
though the autobiographical impulse seeks to express a unique life,
almost in contradiction, these life stories repeat a common plot of
race difference and conflict with white American hegemony. They
therefore come to represent something other, both more communal
and more abstract than the particular life” (292). In other words,
despite the definition and the requirement of the genre, most
Japanese American autobiographies tend to conceive of themselves
JaeEun Yoo
88
as communal projects. Thus, the “I” of typical Japanese American
autobiographical writing is implicitly subsumed by “we.” In stark
contrast, as a novel, The Buddha takes the collective voice of Japanese
immigrant women, while their individual differences—personality,
background, social status, employment, and so on—almost break free
from the imposed collective subject “we.”
Nevertheless, before the reader can fully appreciate the
diversity of these women, and before the women can have any
chance to connect with their daughters, Otsuka abruptly removes
them from the narrative. The Buddha follows Japanese picture brides
until they are interned in War Relocation Camps; once they are
removed from their neighborhoods, the reader never gets another
glimpse of them. This is another structural difference that
distinguishes The Buddha from other writings on World War II
internment. Most writing, including Otsuka’s previous novel, focuses
on what happened to the Japanese Americans during and after the
internment, whereas in The Buddha, their disappearance is both
figurative and literal. This paper argues that this radical strategic
difference should be read in the context of the post-9/11 era in which
the novel was published.
The Buddha starts with a chapter titled “Come Japanese!”
Originally published as an independent short story in Granta, “Come
Japanese!” portrays Japanese picture brides on their way across the
Pacific Ocean to the United States. The very first sentence justifies the
novel’s use of the first person plural subject by announcing the
central common trait the girls share—their limited sexual experience:
“On the boat we were mostly virgins” (5). What follows, however,
has the opposite effect of this statement, as it shows how the girls
Lost in the Passage
89
differ from each other. Starting with the next sentence, the narrative
begins to describe how the girls come from vastly different regions
and social classes, are of different ages, different religions, and
different economic statuses, among other characteristics. The
defining label of the first sentence turns out to be false, too. It is
subsequently revealed that the women’s sexual experience in fact
varies significantly; some of them had husbands before, and some
have even given birth. Many of these so-called virgins have
previously taken lovers, and some continue to do so on the ship.
Indeed, all the details that follow the first sentence work against the
collective “we,” ironically highlighting the rich and diverse life
stories and personalities of the women on the boat. In this regard,
Otsuka’s novel takes an interesting approach to the stereotypical
identification scheme. Instead of demarcating an individual’s voice,
she adopts a collective voice that reflects what the American public
assumes about these women, only to implode this image by showing
the richness of the women’s individualities, which cancel the
homogenizing effects of the collective “we.”
Indeed, Otsuka seems to deliberately employ the limited
stereotypes that Japanese women are habitually categorized into in
order to show their inadequacy. In addition to the assumed sexual
naiveté, “Come Japanese!” stages an infantile image of Japanese
women that was popular in the contemporary American society.
Beginning from the middle 19th century, Western tourists and
missionaries circulated infantilized images of Japanese, mixing
exoticism with cultural condescension. Faced with the military threat
of Japan, this image dramatically intensifies before and during World
War II. At the center of this infantilization was the body of Japanese
90
JaeEun Yoo
women as the site of sexual attraction and perverse nurturing
(Yamamoto 17-8). The picture brides on the boat do appear childish
when they ask trivial questions to the one white man on the boat.
However, as we have already seen, they are not confined to this
simplified girlish image. Their rich individuality, along with their
stout resolution to leave their old life behind, problematizes and
ridicules the white man’s paternal condescension toward the women.
Simultaneously, Otsuka takes pains to remind the reader that
this trans-Pacific voyage should not be taken as a utopian period.
These women’s diversity is not designed to be read as a nostalgic
longing for a lost ideal state, but rather as the women’s potential for
resistance against the homogenizing social forces that are at work
against them. What practically imposes the “we” on the women is
not the presumed fact that they are virgins, but the fact that they are
picture brides—that they have been sold by their fathers to
prospective husbands. In other words, what they have in common is
their relationship to their as yet unseen husbands. However, the
women still retain certain forms of agency as they acknowledge that
going to America is a better option than living in Japan, and thus
accept their destination as their choice: “But even the most reluctant
of us had to admit that it was better to marry a stranger in America
than grow old with a farmer from the village” (7).
This imagined agency in choosing their future is delineated
through their relationship to their mothers. They have accepted
going to America as their own choice, because they chose not to live
like their mothers: “[O]ur mother, who knew everything, and could
often read our mind, had looked at us as though we were crazy. Do
you want to spend the rest of your life crouched over a field? (We had
Lost in the Passage
91
hesitated, and almost said yes, for hadn’t we always dreamed of
becoming our mother? Wasn’t that all we had ever once wanted to
be?)” (16, italics and parenthesis original). The picture brides, upon
agreeing to their arranged marriage, decide that they do not, after all,
want to inherit their mothers’ lives. Accordingly, the women do not
appear as victims in their own minds; their mothers had no choice,
whereas they have made a choice. In other words, instead of viewing
their social positions as defined in relation to their fathers, the
women conceive of themselves as actively deciding their own fates
thanks to their emotional relationships to their mothers. Even long
after they have parted, the daughters recall their mothers and live by
the old advice their mothers gave them: “Walk like the city not like
the farm! (mincing steps with our toes turned properly in)” (6), “You
will see: women are weak, but mothers are strong” (10), and “One
must not get too attached to the things of this world” (101). As in
other Asian American women writers’ work, this connection serves
as the women’s source of individual strength. Thus, in the first
chapter, we glimpse the girls acting as independent subjects: even
though their fathers have sold them overseas, they do retain control
over their social and sexual lives.
Yet in The Buddha, this mother-daughter relationship is
always already marked by its break. On the ship, the women confess,
“[W]e 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?” (5). Otsuka
often highlights the importance of the daughters’ ties to their
mothers only to underline the fact that mothers are powerless in
patriarchal societies. Even the young children some of the picture
92
JaeEun Yoo
brides have had to leave behind in Japan are invariably girls, and this
broken relationship leaves an indelible mark on their lives thereafter:
“On the boat we had no idea we would dream of our daughter every
night until the day that we died, and that in our dreams she would
always be three and as she was when we last saw her” (12).
“On the Boat, ” the picture brides’ agency and vital individuality
are temporarily sustained by their emotional connection to their mother—
their legacy and the hope of living a different life from those of their
mothers. Off the boat, these women are quickly disillusioned as they find
themselves exposed to the double oppression of not only gender but also
racial discrimination. The women have accepted America as their choice
in the hope of living a different life from that of their mothers, but, as
they soon find out, their lives in America differ from their mothers’
lives only in that they have to suffer more. Most of them live by
working on California farms, crouched like their mothers were, even
though it was to escape this destiny that they have chosen to come to
America. Many others work as maids, which is considered a worse
fate than working as farmhands in Japan. Once on American soil,
these women are bound by their husband’s authority just as their
mothers were by their fathers’, and unlike their mothers, they have to
shoulder an additional burden—racial prejudice. Now the “they”
who forcefully bind them under the collective subject “we” are white
people. The novel follows the slow process through which the
women’s individual life stories and personalities are crushed by
harsh living conditions and stifling stereotypes. The women are
either not seen or, when seen, seen as either victims to be saved or
exotic sexual symbols, the only two categories Asian women were
placed into at that time. Even though Otsuka takes special care to
Lost in the Passage
93
describe their lives as anything but uniform, it is clear that any
distinct characteristics the women manage to maintain are
indiscernible under the gaze of white people, regardless of whether
the white people are hospitable or hostile.
When seen alongside their husbands, these women are
stereotyped into two groups. They are the representatives of Yellow
Peril: “We were an unbeatable, unstoppable economic machine and if
our progress was not checked the entire western United States would
soon become the next Asiatic outpost and colony” (35). Or they are
the members of model minority: “They [the white employers]
bragged about us to their neighbors. They bragged about us to their
friends. They claimed to like us much more than they did any of the
others. No better class of help can be found” (40). Often, the women
are considered as both, regardless of the apparent contradiction. As
Yellow Peril, the Japanese American farming families are considered
rightful targets of hate crimes. As members of model minority,
Japanese American maids are exploited and exposed to domestic
violence and sexual abuse. As Nadia Kim points out, “model
minority and the yellow peril/foreigner makes apparent that the two
ideologies are not discrete but part of a continuum of racialization”
(5). Both racial stereotypes restrain the women’s potential of
resistance and individual vitality.
Unlike the months when they were on the boat, this
racialization affects the women because they lose their connection to
their mother. In other words, the erosion of the women’s individuality is
proportional to the loss of their emotional connection to their mothers.
Not only are the women working like their mothers, but they suffer
from severe ethnic discrimination. Worn down by their harsh living
JaeEun Yoo
94
conditions and their refusal to disappoint their mothers by revealing
the truth, the women fail to draw emotional support from the
memory of their mothers. They often write letters to their mothers in
Japan knowing that they will never send them: “[W]e wrote home to
our mothers… but no matter how loudly we called out for our
mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best
of what we had” (31-4). Then later on, they let go of the connection
altogether: “[W]e stopped writing home to our mothers” (37).
Instead of the false virginity, a real common trait now grows
among the women, forced by their physical environment: “All of us
ached while we worked—our hands blistered and bled, our knees
burned, our backs would never recover” (28). In this way, under the
undifferentiating gaze and extreme living conditions, the women’s
individual voices slowly begin to “disappear,” even before they are
physically taken away: “We put away our mirrors. We stopped
combing our hair. We forgot about makeup…. We forgot about
Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us
that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died. We stopped writing
home to our mothers. We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped
bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting, We simply
worked, that was all…. And often our husbands did not even notice
we’d disappeared” (37, italics original). To some extent, thus, they
have internalized the white American’s gaze: “Sometimes he [a white
man] looked right through us without seeing us at all, and that was
always the worst. Does anyone even know I am here?” (35). In this
sense, the literal disappearance of the women later in the novel
appears almost as a logical culmination of the social process that the
women experience.
Lost in the Passage
95
The women’s loss of individuality and connection to their
mothers affect the women’s relationships to their own daughters in
turn; their daughters, they realize, will lead a life similar to theirs,
and even though they are physically close, the emotional distance
between them and their daughters cannot be decreased. “Soon we
could barely recognize them…. I feel like a duck that’s hatched goose’s
eggs…. Our daughters took big long steps, in the American manner,
and moved with undignified haste…. Mostly, they were ashamed of
us” (74, italics original). Because of this lack of generational
communication and bonding, these women remain “little girls” in
their own minds long after they have grown up and given birth to
their daughters: “And when we’d saved up enough money to help
our parents live a more comfortable life we would pack up our things
and go back home to Japan…. Our mothers would be sitting by the
well with their sleeves tied up, washing the evening’s rice. And when
they saw us they would just stand up and stare. ‘Little girl,’ they
would say to us, ‘where in the world have you been?’” (53).
Accordingly, the Japanese picture brides never become good mothers
to their daughters, even though most of them do physically become
mothers, as they give birth to many children and raise them under
conditions of extreme poverty and back-breaking labor. They often
confess their inability to protect their children and feeling estranged
from them. They are neither mothers nor daughters; they are just the
Japanese, perpetually alien in the United States and never fully
integrated into human relationships.
Generational gaps and conflicts between immigrant parents
and their America-born children are a common theme in Asian
American literature; so much so that Lisa Lowe warns that
JaeEun Yoo
96
“interpreting Asian American culture exclusively in terms of the
master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation
essentializes
Asian
American
culture”
(63).
Yamamoto
also
acknowledges that “a number of Asian American literary works deal
in varying degrees with question of generational difference and
intergenerational conflict, and these thematics have been popularly
accepted as characterizing Asian American literature in general”
(142). Most of the works, however, focus on exploring ways in which
the generational conflicts can be overcome. Analyzing the way
women writers of color depart from “white mainstream feminist
models and narratives,” Elizabeth Ho argues that “as much as there
were intense conflicts with mothers, they [the women writers of color]
emphasized the mothers’ powerful social and emotional presence in
nurturing their creativity and in establishing the homeplace as a political
space for survival and resistance for their subordinated racial-ethnic
families” (37). Yamamoto also maintains that “in contrast to models that
eclipse maternity and maternal narratives as the necessary condition for
daughterly subjectivity to emerge, the writings by these Japanese
American women suggest that, in fact, the daughter as subject must
identify and align herself with, not against, the mother” (197).
What is peculiar about Otsuka’s novel is that, even though it
does present the women’s longing for their mothers and care for their
daughters, it does not give them a chance to develop full
relationships with either their mothers or daughters. Whereas most
of the other Asian American novels seek out a way to narrow the
emotional distance between mothers and daughters, the narrative of
The Buddha takes a surprising turn and sweeps the women away
before the reader’s eyes; as readers might have expected all along,
Lost in the Passage
97
during World War II, these women, along with their families,
disappear into camps in unknown locations. Because the expression
of experiences unique to minority groups has been suppressed by
dominant culture for a long time, it is not uncommon to find
significant symbols of silence and absence in Asian American
literature. Thus, there have been efforts to read these figures. KingKok Cheung, for instance, reads silence as a paradoxical articulation
of minority experience, calling such figural silence “articulate silence”
in her book with the same title. According to her, the concept of
articulate silence enables Asian American writers and their readers to
deconstruct the West’s polarized understanding of speech and
silence, reinventing, but not reappropriating, the past. In a similar
way, Yamamoto reads figural absence of mothers in Japanese
American literature as a disguised form of subjectivity. However, in
The Buddha, what follows the historical event of the internment is an
absolute loss of the women’s stories. It is dissimilar to Cheung’s
“articulate silence” or Yamamoto’s “figural absence” in that the
readers encounter a literal lack of the women’s voice and stories after
they disappear altogether from the narrative.
In this sense, Otsuka seems to be writing against a tradition
of reading Asian American literature as exotic description of filial
conflict and reconciliation, which has been popular trend since the
1980’s. In 1990, Ho points out that “the mother-daughter narratives
have become so chic and profitable that non-Asians (as well as
Asians) want a share of the market for things Asian and Asian
American.… Mainstream publishers, of course, are on the prowl for
marketable, proven formulas and genres by which to woo broad
98
JaeEun Yoo
audience to multicultural commodities…. [In the case of Amy Tan,]
the writer and her text have been appropriated, advertised, and
exoticized for mainstream consumption” (57-8). In the center of this
cultural phenomenon was Amy Tan’s nation-wide bestseller, The
Joy Luck Club, though Ho pardons Tan, arguing that this
commodification is not the author’s fault. The romanticized reading
of Asian American literature was still so very popular in the mid1990’s that it was critical for Lowe to throw a different light on The
Joy Luck Club in order to restore the power and complexity of the
social criticism that the novel performs. Accordingly, Lowe claims
that Tan, instead of capitalizing on the trend, actually thematizes
“how the trope of the mother-daughter relationship comes to
symbolize Asian American culture. That is, we can read the novel as
commenting on the national public’s aestheticizing of motherdaughter relationships in its discourse about Asian Americans” (7980). The Buddha intervenes in a more radical way. It is not simply that
the relationship between Japanese American mothers and daughters
suffer from the social pressure that they experience; the relationship
does not survive the national hysteria and the interment during
World War II, as mothers and daughters disappear into the camps
never to be seen again in the novel. Otsuka thus refuses to downplay
social oppression these women had to undergo by highlighting (and
somewhat romanticizing) the persistence and resilience of their
mother-daughter relationship.
So why not follow these Japanese women into the camps as
the author did in her previous work, When the Emperor Was Divine?
Or why not focus on the survival of the women and their children as
Lost in the Passage
99
other Japanese American writers before her have? 1 One answer
would be that Otsuka is not interested in exploring ways in which
identities are perceived and formed in the United States. Rather, she
is interested in pointing to what is irrevocably lost—the individual
voices, lives, and experiences of the women who, never having been
accepted as Japanese or American, did not have any chance to
function as mothers or daughters.
In the second to last chapter of The Buddha, “Last Day,” the
reader witnesses the rich diversity of Japanese American women one
last time before they all disappear. The reader realizes that the
women have successfully, though to different degrees, struggled
against the homogenizing forces of racial stereotypes and harsh
living conditions. Because of this last burst of rich diversity, their loss
is felt all the more acutely in the last chapter. Instead of following the
Japanese women to the camps, in the last chapter of The Buddha,
Otsuka suddenly changes the narrative’s point of view. “We”
becomes the collective voice of the non-Japanese townspeople—
presumably, the whites—and this last chapter describes how the
1
For instance, Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, one of the more widely read
autobiographical novels on the internment before the publication of When the
Emperor Was Divine, concludes with the Nisei protagonist’s bold assertion that
“the Japanese and American parts of me were now blended into one” (238).
Other relatively well-known works that deal with Japanese American
experience during World War II, including John Okada’s No-No Boy, Joy
Kogawa’s Obasan, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar, and
Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family, also
focus on the portrayal of the life during and/or after the internment.
JaeEun Yoo
100
Japanese, once forced to leave, become gradually and completely
forgotten.
This is an interesting choice on the part of the author,
especially when her former work mainly focuses on where The
Buddha has left: life in and after the internment camp. However, even
in When the Emperor Was Divine, the family—mother, daughter, and
son—leave as individuals and return as collective “Japanese
Americans.” Most notably, in the second to last chapter, which
narrates the family’s return to their neighborhood, the daughter and
son’s identity appear indistinguishable, revealing not only that they
are permanently marked as Japanese Americans and nothing else,
but also that they have internalized the label through the camp years.
Thus, both works emphasize the irretrievable loss that the national
hysteria and the ensuing internment have caused.
In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066,
which classified 120,000 Japanese Americans as “enemy aliens” and
ordered their quick evacuation to desert internment camps. In 2001,
using strikingly similar rhetoric, the U.S. government, “in the interest
of national security,” declared a group of people “enemy combatants”
and exiled them to prison camps. As critics have noted, an obvious
similarity exists between the two historical periods. Much in the way
the attack on Pearl Harbor loosed an anti-Japanese frenzy in both the
United States and Canada in 1941, 9/11 unleashed a strain of antiMuslim sentiment and Arab profiling and suspicion.“In both cases,
what began presumably as a matter of ‘national security’ quickly
escalated into an unconscionable set of practices targeting a minority
population on the basis of race” (Gauthier 165-166). Mary Dudziak
further points out that the war on terror is the most prolonged
Lost in the Passage
101
political situation to which Americans have been adapted since
World War II (5). In this regard, the disappearance of Japanese
American women in The Buddha must be read as the author’s
comment not only on World War II or post 9/11 America, but also on
the continuity between the first historical moment and the second.
In the last chapter of The Buddha, unidentified neighbors miss
their less noisy, cleaner Japanese neighbors, comparing them to
“negroes” or other minority ethnic groups who have replaced them.
They say that, if they had only known, they would have helped the
Japanese. However, the reason they miss their Japanese neighbors
reveals that they have retained their racial prejudices. Otsuka thus
deplores the neighbors’ bigotries and indifference that continues to
feed their fear of the other. Only in 1981, 39 years after Executive
Order 9066, was the Commission on Wartime Relocation and
Internment of Civilians established by the US Congress. However, as
Marnie Gauthier notes, the report of the commission that
acknowledged the US government’s wrongdoing in interning
Japanese Americans did not “act as a catalyst for former internees to
share their stories,” most likely because it came too late (165). On
May 12, 2009, President Obama refused Senator Leahy’s call for the
truth commission “to investigate torture and other abuses during the
‘war on terror’” by answering “generally speaking I’m more
interested in looking forward than looking back” (Stein 20). The U.S.
public conveniently forgot the history of internment and seems to
have responded to the war on terror in a similar way—that is, by
refusing to consider the injustice done.
In an interview with National Book Foundation, Otsuka
admits that she had historical resonance of her work in mind when
102
JaeEun Yoo
she was working on The Buddha: “But I wrote Buddha very much in
the light of what is going on in this country now, post-9/11: how,
overnight, Arabs and Muslims have suddenly become ‘the enemy’
and are being targeted for investigation and interrogation.” She
finishes the remark with a lament: “haven’t we learned anything at
all?” The group of protagonists in The Buddha never arrives in the
America of which they dreamed. They were neither Japanese,
because they were sold by their fathers, nor were they Americans,
because they were denied their individual identities and rights in
America. Otsuka deliberately breaks away from the tradition of
mother-daughter stories to highlight such historical loss and what
America might be losing right now. In this regard, it is significant
that the last chapter is titled “A Disappearance,” possibly implying
there have been or are “other” disappearances. These women,
tragically lost in the passage between Japan and America, serve as
Otsuka’s warning about those who may become similarly lost in post
9/11 America.
Lost in the Passage
103
Works Cited
Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong
Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
Cudjoe, R. Selwin. “Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical
Statement.” Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical
Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984.
De Jesus, Melinda Luisa. “Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina
American Identity and Maternal Legacies in Lynda J. Barry’s
One
Hundred
Demons.”
Meridians:
Feminism,
Race,
Transnationalism 5.1 (2004): 1-26.
Dudziak, Mary. War Time An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2012.
Gauthier, Marnie. Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American
Fiction: Counterhistory. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis,
Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American
Mother-Daughter Writing. Oxford: Altamira Press, 1999.
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki. Farewell to Manzanar. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1973.
Kim, Nadia. Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Boston: David Godine, 1981.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self:
An Inquiry into the Subject of the Contemporary Asian
Woman Writer.” World Englishes 9. 2 (1990): 175-91.
JaeEun Yoo
104
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Okada, John. No-No Boy. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1976.
Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in The Attic. New York: Anchor Books, 2011.
_____. When the Emperor was Divine. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
_____. “2011 National Book Award Finalist, Fiction. ”Interview with
Bret Anthony Johnston.
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2011_f_otsuka_interv.html
Sone, Monica. Nisei Daughter. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1953.
Stein, Sam. “Obama on Spanish Torture Investigation: I Prefer to
Look Forward.” Huffington Post, Apr. 16, 2009.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1989.
Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American
Family. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1982.
Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American
Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P,
1999.
Lost in the Passage
Abstract
105
JaeEun Yoo
Julie Otsuka’s latest novel, The Buddha in the Attic, is an
unconventional Asian American novel in the sense that it emphasizes
the break between Japanese American mothers and their daughters.
Despite an attachment to their mothers, Japanese picture brides in
the novel are separated from them by paternal authority and physical
distance. They become mothers in America, but instead of being a
source of inspiration and strength, the alienation they experience
from their daughters renders them helpless. Unlike other Asian
American novels that thematize mother-daughter relationship, The
Buddha in the Attic removes the women from the narrative before they
can have any chance to connect with their daughters. Once the
collective protagonists of the novel, the Japanese picture brides, leave
their neighborhoods to be interned in War Relocation Camps, the
reader never gets another glimpse of them. This is a significant
structural difference that distinguishes the novel from other writing
on Word War II internment, as most writing, including Otsuka’s
previous novel, focus on what happens to the Japanese Americans
during and after the internment. This paper argues that this radical
strategic difference should be read in the context of the post-9/11 era
in which the novel was published. By featuring the women’s
disappearance after the Pearl Harbor attack as both figurative and
literal, Otsuka warns her readers against the loss of minority people
and their voices during the similar national hysteria that swept
America after 9/11.
106
JaeEun Yoo
Key Words: The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka, mother-daughter
relationship, the internment, post 9/11 America
Received : Dec. 3. 2013
Revised : Dec. 16. 2013
Accepted : Dec. 20. 2013