“I had run across so many interesting stories during my research-stories of women whose husbands had sent photographs of themselves taken 20 years earlier, of women who had sailed to America expecting to live lives of leisure only to find themselves working as field hands and laundresses within days of their arrival, of women who had run away from their husbands and drifted into lives of prostitution, of women who had always wanted to come to America and were willing to marry a man, any man, to get there-that I wanted to tell them all. Otsuka says she struggled for months to find the right voice to tell the story. It’s how thousands of Japanese women came to this country before Asians were excluded altogether in 1924.”
“There were no picture brides in my family, but it’s a very common first generation story. The Buddha in the Attic follows a group of Japanese “picture brides” who sail to San Francisco in 1919 to marry men they only know through exchanging photographs. Her exquisitely crafted and resonant new novel is much less autobiographical, she says. Her grandfather was arrested as a suspected Japanese spy the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Otsuka’s mother, uncle, and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. When the Emperor Was Divine, published in 2002, captures the experience of a Berkeley family evacuated from the West Coast to a Japanese internment camp in 1942 with breathtaking restraint. Otsuka came east to study art at Yale, and some years later ended up in the MFA program at Columbia, where she began writing her first novel. Her father was an electronic engineer in the aerospace industry her mother worked as a lab technician in a hospital before having Julie and her two younger brothers. She was born in Palo Alto, California, and moved to Palos Verdes when she was nine. I have a favorite table in the back, which is where I wrote both my books,” she says.īut the material for Otsuka’s first two novels is rooted in the West Coast. “No internet access, no music, no outlets, and the coffee refills are endless and free. Novelist Julie Otsuka is an Upper West Sider, with a regular spot at her neighborhood café, the Hungarian Pastry Shop.
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