The Buddha in the Attic

In her 2020 book Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition, the Korean American writer Cathy Park Hong describes how Asian Americans occupy a unique position in relation to both white people and other people of color. Hong describes Asians as middlemen who, though not equal in power to white people, are white people’s closest collaborators in reinforcing their own privilege and keeping other people of color down. While Hong is writing about contemporary America and Otsuka about the early 20th century, Otsuka’s portrayal of the Japanese women’s relationship with their white employers indicates that the seeds for this phenomenon are already being planted.

Although the Japanese women hired as white women’s personal maids are initially so embarrassed about their position that they do not mention it in their letters to Japan, they soon realize that they are relatively privileged. The white employers assign them above-stairs chores where they remain visible, while they force their Black maids into the obscurity and anonymity of below-stairs duties. While the history of slavery and segregation makes the relationship between the Black women and their white employers fraught, the Japanese women seem a fresh, exotic import to the white women. These white women treat their Japanese maids like dolls or pets, renaming them and bragging about them to their neighbors. A common boast is “that girl never stops until she gets the job done” (40). Although this appears to be a compliment, it actually depersonalizes the Japanese maids by reducing the subjectivity of full-grown women to that of obedient girls, while also reinforcing the stereotype of Asians as servile hard-workers. The young Japanese women feel uncertain as to how to respond when their white employers “claim[] to like [them] much more than they [do] any of the others” and say that “no better class of help can be found” (40). On the one hand, they are flattered to be higher in the racial hierarchy and to be taken into the confidence of the white women they so admire. However, the maids never fall into the trap of thinking that the relationship is an equal one, especially when the white women dismiss them during pregnancy, or use them as an example of failure when they are encouraging their children to study hard. The culmination of the superficial bond between the Japanese women and their employers comes with internment, when the former’s loyalty is repaid with mistrust and incarceration.

The white men the women encounter respond to them with even more exoticization and objectification than their wives, and this fetishization interacts with the women’s experience of patriarchy in sometimes surprising ways. The women are so deprived of touch by the husbands who have gone cold to them that they often welcome the advances of white men: “[W]hen he led us upstairs to the bedroom and laid us across the bed […] we wept because it had been so long since we’d been held” (45). However, where the women want to feel seen and desired as individuals, the men expect them to behave in racially stereotyped ways; they ask them to put on the kimonos the women have long packed away and to speak Japanese to them. The women who have run away from their husbands to become sex-workers and exotic dancers go a step further, making their exoticism to white men a profession and becoming the stuff of white men’s geisha fantasies when they tell them that they are from “somewhere in Kyoto” (47). However, because they are unhappy in their subordination to their husbands, some women find a level of empowerment in perpetuating a racist fantasy.

That the white men’s interest in the women is a fantasy rather than a reality is evident in their offers to pay for abortions of children that result from the liaisons; ultimately, they also send the women off to find different employment. Meanwhile, the women who have fallen in love with these men suffer the repercussions when the affairs end. One is divorced by her husband and sent back to Japan in shame, while another commits suicide by weighting her white silk wedding kimono with stones and drowning in the sea. While sex with white men is a way in which women who are tired of being dehumanized by their husbands and employers to achieve temporary distinction, they risk losing everything.

Ultimately, although the Japanese women catch their white employers’ imaginations and enjoy privileges that are inaccessible to other women of color, they are still objectified and depersonalized. As Otsuka writes, “[W]e were there when they needed us and when they did not, poof, we were gone” (44). A person who can be summoned and dismissed at will is not truly seen or accepted by the summoner. When the internment causes the women to truly disappear from their employers’ lives, the employers are mildly inconvenienced and complain that women from other ethnic groups do not provide the same quality of service, but they quickly recover from the loss.