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.” 

Here, Otsuka juxtaposes the first-person plural voice of the girls with the sense that they are being looked at by strangers (perhaps even the book’s readers) who might see them as a collective of short, black-haired foreigners. However, the differences between members of the group are apparent from the statement that they are “mostly”—that is, not entirely—virgins. Just as some girls stand out from the group for having sexual experience, others do for their impoverished diet or their extreme youth. They are traveling together and yet cannot be taken as a unit.

“We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares. We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her.” 

The women traveling to America have nightmares about the rice paddies, which for them represent the worst outcome for the future. Rice paddy farming is a collective enterprise that puts the wishes and needs of the individual second to the overall profit. In traveling to America, the women think that they have escaped this sort of dehumanization, as well as the kind of poverty that means they stand to be sold off as geishas—female entertainers—to benefit their families. However, when the dreaming girls mistake themselves for their sisters, it foreshadows their actual fate; they have been sold off into marriage with a stranger so that their families will no longer have to provide for them.