"The Buddha in the Attic" Summary

"The Buddha in the Attic" is a book written by Julie Otsuka following the lives of Japanese picture brides.

The women on the boat were mostly virgins.

They had long black hair, flat wide feet, and were relatively short.

Some had only eaten rice gruel as girls.

Some were fourteen years old.

Some came from the city wearing stylish clothes, while others wore faded kimonos from the country.

Some came from the mountains and had never seen the sea.

The photographs of their husbands were the first thing women on the boat compared.

The husbands in the photos were handsome, with strong chins, good posture, and straight noses.

They were dressed in gray frock coats and fine Western three-piece suits.

They were standing in front of wooden A-frame houses or leaning against Model T Fords, waiting for them in San Francisco.

Down below in steerage, it was filthy and dim.

The beds were narrow metal racks with hard mattresses stained from other journeys.

The pillows were stuffed with dried wheat hulls.

There was one porthole, and at night the darkness filled with whispers.

The women dreamed of wooden sandals, indigo silk, a house with a chimney, and being lovely and tall.

The women dreamed of the rice paddies they wanted to escape, and of their older sisters who had been sold to geisha houses.

Seasickness was common on the boat, with some unable to walk or remember their husbands' names.

Some prayed to Kannon, the goddess of mercy, while others turned silently green.

Sometimes at night, they were jolted awake by a swell and wondered where they were.

They thought of their mothers, and if they had aired out their old kimonos.

The women knew how to cook, sew, serve tea, arrange flowers, behave at funerals, and write melancholy seventeen-syllable poems.

A girl must blend into a room and be present without appearing to exist.

They knew how to pull weeds, chop kindling, haul water, and walk two miles with an eighty-pound sack of rice.

The women had good manners and were polite, except when they cursed like sailors.

They spoke like ladies, pretended to know less than they did, and took small, mincing steps.

They stayed up at night discussing the continent ahead of them.

People there were said to eat nothing but meat and their bodies covered with hair.

The trees were enormous, the plains vast, and the women were loud and tall.

Books were read from back to front and soap was used in the bath.

In America, the women did not have to work in the fields and there was plenty of rice and firewood and men held open doors and tipped their hats.

Farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi had thick wrists and broad shoulders and never went to bed after nine.

Some came from a mountain hamlet in Yamanashi and had only recently seen their first train, while others came from Tokyo, and had seen everything.

Many more were from Kagoshima, and spoke in a thick southern dialect.

Some were from Hokkaido, which would later explode.

The youngest was twelve, and from the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, and had not yet begun to bleed.

The oldest was thirty-seven, and from Niigata, and had spent her entire life taking care of her invalid father.

All the eligible men from Kumamoto had left the year before to find work in Manchuria.

One was from a silk-weaving village in Fukushima, and had lost her first husband to the flu, and her second to another woman.

Charles, a professor of foreign languages at the university in Osaka, was the first white person many of the women had ever seen.

He had a Japanese Wife, and a child, and had been to America many times.

Some could not resist becoming friendly with the deckhands, who came from the same villages.

One became pregnant and did not know it.

Another jumped overboard after spending the night with a sailor.

Another fell in love with a returning Methodist missionary.

Some were brooders and spent the voyage lying facedown in their berths, thinking of the men they had left behind.

They were already married, but a few of them fell in love anyway.

On the boat they complained about bed-bugs, lice, insomnia, the stench from the latrines, Kazuko's aloofness, Chiyo's throat clearing, and Fusayo's incessant humming.

They complained about their disappearing hairpins.

The girls from first class had never once said hello from beneath their violet silk parasols in all the times they had walked past them.

Mostly, though, most of them were really very happy, for soon they would be in America with their new husbands.

On the boat they carried their husbands' pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from their necks.

The carried the picture in silk purses or old tea tins.

The women carried them pressed flat between the pages of Come, Japanese! and Guidance for Going to America and Ten Ways to Please a Man.

And when they asked her which man she liked better-the man in the photograph or the Lord Jesus Himself-she smiled mysteriously and replied, "Him, of course."

On the boat, several had secrets, which they swore they would keep from their husbands for the rest of their lives.

They had to make choices-where to sleep, who to trust, who to befriend, whether to say something to the neighbor who snored, or whose feet smelled worse than their own.

Somewhere on the boat there was a captain from whose cabin a beautiful young girl was said to emerge every morning at dawn.

There was a captain from whose cabin a beautiful young girl that may have been from first class.

On the boat they sometimes crept into each other's berths and talked about all the things they remembered from home. They discussed faborite face creams, the benefits of leaden powder, the first time they saw their husband's photograph.

A few of the women on the boat never did get used to being with a man, and if there had been a way of going to America without marrying one, they would have figured it out.

On the boat they could not have known that when they first saw their husbands they would have no idea who they were.

The handsome young men in the photographs become men in shabby black coats waiting for them down below on the deck.

That night their new husbands took them quickly, calmly, gently, but firmly, and without saying a word.

They assumed that they were the virgins the matchmakers had promised them that they were.

They took them flat on their backs on the bare floor of the Minute Motel, with exquisite care or downtown, in second-rate rooms at the Kumamoto Inn or in the best hotels in San Francisco that a yellow man could set foot in at the time.

They took them before they were ready and the bleeding did not stop for three days.

They took them as they cried out with pleasure and then covered their mouths in shame..

Whites settled on the edges of their towns.

The first word of their language they were taught was water-shout it out the moment you begin to feel faint in the fields.

Most of us did, but one of them-Yoshiko, who had been raised by wet nurses behind high-walled courtyards in Kobe and never seen a weed in her life-did not.

Home was a cot in one of their bunkhouses at the Fair Ranch in Yolo.

Home was a long tent beneath a leafy plum tree at Kettleman's.

Home was a patch of earth in a pear orchard in Auburn.

Home was by the side of a man who had been shoveling up weeds for the boss for years.

Those parts of town we seldom saw at all, for they belong to a different class from hy who eats, sleeps, and goes over the accounts with the wife.

A number of us was the first person we have ever seen of your Race! Our fathers had told us they’re all little yellow men that do not believe in the Lord.

Read In the beginning We wondered about them constantly. why did they mount their horses from the left side. How were they able to tell apart. Why were they always shouting?

Stay away from them, we were warned. approach them with caution if you must.

The invisible world they now belong to.

Their plows weighed more than they did, and were difficult to use, and their horses were twice the size of our horses back home in Japan.

Don't let them discourage you. be patient. Stay calm.

They admired them for our stamina, discipline, Docile dispositions, and unusal ability to tolerate heat.

The best breed they ever hired just drifts folks dont to look after them at all.

We could not read there megazines or newscast.

Their men slapped our husbands on Back shontud to our husband to so solly as they do knock off out hats.

they gave us a hard time the waiders was last the house as shers said no cuse

their wimen Asked to move away fom them told us there no clues work following.

They Admonished this had nothing todo with the war.

What wounts not ofende The only way to resist what they say.

they are being asssimiute as their husbands say.

Then we would work with our hauls and hads a dought time as we did the what even has ever

whenever we had to let J-touns to walk to clean the toons with them

At least now we were in America now and get better and make it better!

Secretly to Rescue them every day by seeing them or any day and time

The first thing the noticed after a long to do as we wished

We gave birthday under oak trees.

We Gave birt