Domesticity and Immigrant Women’s Labor in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic

Abstract

Tracing the stories of Japanese picture brides, a generation of Japanese women who arrived in San Francisco in the early 1900’s for arranged marriages, and their American lives, Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) combines a literary and historical focus. The experiences of dislocation, otherness, assimilation, and exclusion mark the protagonists’ lives, illustrating the dominant narratives of race, ethnicity, and gender. Otsuka articulates the problems oscillating between national consciousness and ethnic particularity, providing a critique of U.S. structures of domination and oppression that regulate the immigrant labor market. My paper offers a discussion about Japanese American women protagonists who must constantly reinvent themselves in the play of difference. The female lens, which the author employs, allows her to demonstrate how they are subjected to the forces guided by discourse of culture, ethnicity, and gender. The subaltern woman’s perspective on the domestic politics of U.S. is rendered through a collective narrator, and the absence of an identifiable individual voice stresses the characters’ fragmentation. America as home is transvalued, revealing itself as the site of unhomeliness, insecurity, and violence.