 Welcome to Church of the Chair. We can disagree on anything but human rights. I'm your host, E, and today we're talking about Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. Julie Otsuka's long-awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine is a tour to force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as picture brides nearly a century ago. The Buddha in the Attic is a story of the picture brides that came over from Japan in the early 1900s to live and work in America. These ladies were, I think, the first people to be catfished. Imagine you receive a photo of Idris Elba in the mail only to accept the proposal, show up on the dock, and find sloth waiting for you. What I find most interesting about this book is that no group of people is a monolith. We all know this. There are good and bad in every community in every group, no matter the size. But this book is written as reference to a monolith. By that I mean that Julie Otsuka refers to her characters using the pronouns we, us, and our. Did you say pronouns? Yeah, they are pronouns. They! Are you done? Anyways, what I find also interesting is that while speaking of all of these women as we, us, and ours, she also goes into heavy detail of individual lived experiences. This was intriguing to me. The choice to use the we, us, and our, but also dive into the individual experiences. The book starts in Japan letting you know, filling you in on what these women went through before they came over. Then it moves into the horrible boat ride that they took to get here, only to arrive in America, and as I said before, to be wholly catfished by the people who sent the proposal to begin with. It then moves on to talk about how these women were used as slave labor, to work fields, to clean house, to make sure that their husbands were happy in every way possible. Won't go in any more detail there. And then it deals with the babies that were born of these unions. Sometimes due to infidelity, sometimes the baby was lost. It covers the entire gambit of things that happened with these women during their pregnancies or being unable to carry pregnancies to term. The next section is these about these children growing up and becoming adults and choosing their own names, changing their names from the original Japanese names that they were given at birth to more Americanized names. The last part of this book deals with the ostracization and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The way Otsuko handled this was exceptional, showing the towns in which these people lived and how they slowly faded from the background. How posters on light poles would just fade over time until they vanished altogether. How shops closed up, how people moved on. This last section is called A Disappearance and it is told from American standpoint, whereas the rest of the book is told from the Japanese The Picture Brides point of view. It's an interesting choice and I found it quite impressive. Now this book has no plot whatsoever. There's no dialogue. There are snippets of conversations and things that are said, but they're in italics. There are no quotation marks or anything like that. It is written in such a way that it is wholly narrative, which surprises me because I feel like I know these people now. The characterization of real human beings, even though it is a fictionalized narrative, the characterization of these picture brides was amazing and I applaud the author. It is no wonder that this book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2011. Well that's all my time for today but I would like to say that if you enjoy learning about other countries and you are not bothered by the crimes of our past here in America, I suggest you go and check out this book. I think you will learn a lot and I think understanding other cultures and their histories is very important to moving forward as a society. But until next time, I'll hail the chair!