The Buddha in the Attic

Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American writer who was born in 1962 in Palo Alto, California. Both The Buddha in the Attic (2011) and her 2002 novel, When the Emperor was Divine, portray the Japanese American experience of internment camps following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The subject is close to Otsuka’s heart; the FBI arrested her grandfather on suspicion of being an enemy spy, while her mother, uncle, and grandmother were interned at a remote camp in Topaz, Utah. The Buddha in the Attic depicts the internment camps as a culmination of the real-life experiences of the “picture brides”—young Japanese women who emigrated to early 20th-century America to marry men they only knew from photographs. The novel won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist.

Otsuka published several chapters of the novel as stand-alone essays in the literary journal Granta. Critics have praised Otsuka’s style, with the Guardian critic Elizabeth Day commenting that the author writes “half poetry, half narration—short phrases, sparse description, so that the current of emotion running through each chapter is made more resonant by her restraint” (Day, Elizabeth. “The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka – review.