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📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

❀ Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 148 pgs.
❀ Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. 129 pgs.
❀ Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers, Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. 144 pgs.

Julie Otsuka, born in 1962 and now sixty-two years old, is the author of three novels: When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), The Buddha in the Attic (2011), and The Swimmers (2022). She initially studied painting, but after facing setbacks in her art career, turned to writing. In 2002, she published When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel based on her family’s history. Since then, she has released a new book roughly every ten years, each maintaining a length of around 150 pages. She humorously notes that regardless of the story she plans to tell or the structure she envisions, she seems to always stop writing at just over 100 pages, as if, after the customary emotional crescendo of the final chapter, she has already said all she needs to say.

Although her works are always met with critical acclaim and win various international awards soon after publication, Otsuka’s slow, compact writing pace sometimes makes one wonder how she sustains her livelihood and what other daily activities she engages in outside of writing. Prominently featured on her personal website is a section on “Schools & Talks,” showing that she frequently tours schools and communities across the United States, discussing Japanese American history with students and other readers.

When the Emperor Was Divine explores the Topaz internment camp for Japanese Americans during the Second World War, while The Buddha in the Attic narrates the lives of Japanese “picture brides” who arrived in America in the late 19th century. The new edition of The Buddha in the Attic includes a detailed reading group guide, addressing not only writing techniques, historical facts, and the specific meaning of key phrases but also the complex, often ambiguous relationships among characters and communities. Both books are recommended reading at numerous universities, signalling a time when Asian American literature is gradually reaching mainstream audiences—even becoming bestsellers. At the same time, recent rightward political trends in the U.S. have accelerated a “book-banning movement,” leading schools and libraries in multiple states to remove books on racial topics, with Otsuka’s works also facing such scrutiny. The COVID-19 pandemic further fuelled anti-Asian sentiments and an increase in hate speech. All three of her published books focus on the family histories and life details of Asian Americans. While each book highlights different time periods and content, some critics accuse her of thematic “homogeneity.” However, when asked if her future works will continue exploring these themes, given the current political and social climate, she has firmly affirmed that they will.

Otsuka’s approach to heavy historical themes is strikingly light and poetic. Consider the opening of The Buddha in the Attic:

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years-faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

In this opening, short and powerful sentences, interspersed with fictional and factual details, conclude with a lingering, evocative image, quickly capturing readers’ attention. However, just as the reader expects the story to delve into individual characters, revealing more of their family histories or a few detailed ocean scenes, the author thwarts those expectations. The Buddha in the Attic is composed of eight chapters, written in chronological order, narrating the journey of the picture brides as they, in their innocent ignorance, board the ships, lose their virginity (almost akin to being raped), toil tirelessly, bear children, and are ultimately driven out of town. Each chapter, like the opening, is structured with parallel phrases, where anaphora is adopted hundreds or even thousands of times, telling countless versions of their stories. There are no expected twists, no interconnected narratives, and no detailed close-ups—only a continuous, collective lament of lives. No wonder this book has crossed oceans in recent years and has been adapted into a catchy minimalist-style theatre production in France. The Swimmers follows a similar form: “Some of us come here because we are injured, and need to heal. We suffer from bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety, melancholia, anhedonia, the usual aboveground afflictions. Others of us…”

Intuitively, this is a writing style that invites scepticism. For a writer, the decision to replicate oneself is inherently risky; in general, the new work almost entirely follows the style and technique of the previous one, along with a significant portion of its themes and content. If there is a structural difference between the new work and the previous one, it might be that The Swimmers advances its plot in a less tightly woven and seamless manner. The Swimmers is divided into two parts. The first part depicts a variety of swimmers—who they are both on land and in the water, whether they fit in or are at ease, and what traumas and worries they carry. Though they differ individually, they find harmony in the pool, following its rules, creating a community for the lonely—a natural refuge. Then, a suspicious crack suddenly appears at the bottom of the pool, first disappearing, then widening, eventually making the swimmers fearful and anxious. The pool is shut down, the community disbands, and the “mermaids” climb back onto land, though they have not grown feet that can carry them steadily. This part ends abruptly. In the second part, one of the swimmers, Alice, is an elderly woman suffering from frontotemporal dementia, who will spend her remaining days in a bleak and brutally indifferent nursing facility. Her daughter and husband occasionally visit, and Alice sometimes recalls fragments of her childhood, wartime experiences, and her displacement and internment as a Japanese American—though the memories are often limited to the dust and dirt of the road. The two parts might even feel disconnected, as though they are linked only by a single character, with each part able to stand alone. Yet, the juxtaposition of the same character displaying starkly different states of mind in different settings, communities, and stages of life highlights the silent fading of life and the quiet erasure of memory, undoubtedly intensifying the reader’s emotional response. The author herself simply describes this structure as a writing experiment. The first part was actually written fifteen years ago, while the nursing home segment was completed alongside The Buddha in the Attic. Only later did she see the potential of merging the two, leading her to complete the work. As a result, The Swimmers is organised in a looser structure, with a slower narrative pace, allowing for more flexible emotional development and expansion.

Another kind of scepticism the author faces is akin to the accusation that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This criticism suggests that the poetic language might soften cruelty and horror or reduce profound life experiences to superficial generalities. This is a reasonable critique, regardless of whether Buddha in the Attic embellishes American perceptions of the interned Japanese Americans or whether The Swimmers, despite its limited historical detail, hints at romanticising dementia. However, whether this issue arises from the author’s stylistic choices remains open to discussion. We might begin by considering the author’s own perspective. When asked why she never writes nonfiction, Otsuka explains that she believes “fiction can slow down time in a way that historical descriptions cannot, allowing readers to sense what it feels like to live in a specific historical moment.” Indeed, even the most exacting readers would struggle to deny that her fictional narratives are grounded in substantial historical research and fieldwork. If language is seen as a medium, then the author’s stylistic preferences may simply streamline each sentence’s content without diminishing the overall information conveyed by the work. Sometimes, though, she chooses to stop at a certain depth, avoiding further excavation. This choice is partly due to a very pragmatic concern—the author admits that she worries about “the more said, the more mistakes made”; if the historical details aren’t meticulously accurate, “any discovered error could shatter the story’s magic.” On another level, the author never intended to create a historical model. Her goal is ultimately to use historical fact to immerse readers in a setting, exploring the “psychological states of characters” to capture the emotional structure of a particular time and place, thus offering readers a foundation to understand, imagine, and empathise with the characters’ lives. The inherent biases, simplifications, and ambiguities within the text may also stem from the fact that historical writing often bears an educative or corrective mission, which is inevitably shaped by the author’s experiences and perspectives.

How, then, is this poetic language made possible? Whose story is the author really trying to tell? The feature that has garnered Otsuka both high praise and the critiques mentioned above is precisely the unique narrative voice in her work. The most notable aspect is her creative use of the first-person plural perspective, creating a portrait of a collective experience. Each individual story is recounted through a unified “we.” The author has admitted that this was an unintentional decision; she initially attempted a single-person perspective, but it did not achieve the desired effect. It wasn’t until she accidentally wrote a line beginning with “we” that the story began to resonate for her. As she continued writing, she felt that telling the lives of hundreds of picture brides in a single voice might seem ambitious, even audacious, but it was the best way to “tell a collective story,” since no single individual’s experience should hold more or less importance than another’s. In Buddha in the Attic, each abusive, reckless husband is “our” husband; each midnight longing for home is “our” longing; each gut-wrenching death is “our” death. The most haunting aspect of this approach is that, as the story progresses, many characters disappear—they die from labour, prostitution, childbirth, or despair—yet “we” continue to tell the tale. This is the paradox inherent to collective narrative: the first-person plural perspective equally cherishes the faint voices of every unnamed individual while equally disregarding each life’s devastating end. The former reflects the ideal (“ought”) of justice; the latter, the reality (“is”) of history.

The Swimmers extends this first-person plural approach to capture the shared loneliness and struggles of the swimmers. But Otsuka’s experimentation does not end here. As early as the final chapter of Buddha in the Attic, she shifts the narrative perspective; “we” becomes the American locals, while the picture brides and their descendants are othered, reduced to “those Japanese.” In The Swimmers, Otsuka employs nearly every narrative perspective: first recounting Alice’s fragmented, tidal memories through “she”; then, when focusing on the assisted living facility, shifting to the institution’s voice, which speaks to Alice with an impersonal “we” that insists her condition is irreversible, her suffering meaningless, her compliance necessary, and, when it is “your” time to die, “we” will free up a bed. In the final chapter, Alice returns to being a somewhat distant “she,” while “you” becomes the role of Alice’s daughter. Through these shifts in perspective, Otsuka orchestrates who is close, who is given a voice, and who stands in focus or recedes into the background. The seemingly simple sentences are imbued with complex narrative “camera work.” The novel ends with a masterful sequence of shot-reverse shots and vertical pans:

You are not sure if she still knows who you are, so you write down your name on a name tag and pin it onto your shirt. You give her a copy of your book and watch her slowly leaf through the pages—her hands, though spotted, are still elegant, with long slender fingers that taper into perfect oval nails—and when she gets to your photograph on the back flap she stares intently at the picture of your face, then at your name printed beneath it, then at your name on the name tag pinned to your shirt, and then up at your face. And when she gets to your face, she stares into your eyes with wonder. She does this loop again and again. Photograph, your name beneath it, your name on your name tag, your face above it. And every time, when she gets to your face, she looks as if she is about to speak.

This simplicity of sadness is so palpable that when readers close the book, they feel as though they are still locked in an exchange with that gaze—at once clouded and clear, vacant yet omniscient.

How to cite: Chen, Jiahe. “Julie Otsuka: The Ideal of Justice and the Reality of History.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Jan. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/01/13/julie-otsuka.

Jiahe Chen, born in 2001, holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from Sciences Po Paris (Paris Institute of Political Studies). Her research centres on cultural industries and gender politics within the Sinophone world. In her spare time, she writes poetry, essays, book reviews, and fiction. Her work has been published in Chinese magazines and platforms, including West Lake and Literaturecave. Some of her pieces have also received recognition in “underground” literary competitions. [All contributions by Jiahe Chen.]

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