Reclaiming a Space in American History with the Collective Voices of the Japanese Picture Brides in Julie Otsuka’s <i>The Buddha in the Attic</i>

Abstract

Julie Otsuka’s 2011 novel The Buddha in the Attic documents the history of ‘picture brides’ who were some of the earliest Japanese female immigrants to the USA and whose narratives remain unwritten, forgotten, and erased. The collective voice of the picture brides in Buddha narrativises the women’s collective loss and effectively delivers a transgressive gesture of resistance toward a national history that refuses to provide a space for those narratives. This paper focuses on Buddha’s literary strategies of using the first-person plural narrative and the repetition of ‘we’, instead of the ‘I’ voice that show how the picture brides failed to be recognised as individual national subjects in the USA and at the same time shows that these voices refuse to be constrained in a singular narrative. This article argues that Otsuka uses a collective voice as a tool with which to inscribe the shared experience of loss, carving out narratives of the picture brides as a subversive alternative to mainstream versions of American history and further claim that collectivity can be a significantly powerful means of occupying a narrative space in the novel.