The Buddha in the Attic

I hardly needed a bookmark to read this book in its entirety. Two years ago when I read When the Emperor Was Divine by the same author I noted the same thing about that novel.

Julie Otsuka's narrator in The Buddha in the Attic comprises a whole people, spoken as "we," and it tells the story, the stories, of Japanese immigrants to the U.S. in the early 1900s.  More specifically, "we" are the Japanese women who came to California as "picture brides."  They have pictures of the men they are to marry, but, as you can imagine, it is not the life they dream about as they cross the ocean.

I found this review of the novel at the NY Times to be particularly insightful.  Becker says that Otsuka's prose is more like poetry, and as I was reading I thought that it WAS like a long, lyrical list poem.