Women in Julie Otsuka's the Buddha in the Attic

Lost in the Passage 85 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.21, No. 3 (2013) Lost in the Passage: (Japanese American) Women in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic JaeEun Yoo (Hanyang University) As is widely known, traditional psychoanalysis theorizes the mother-daughter relationship in negative terms; in order to grow into a mature individual, the daughter must sever emotional ties with her mother. As Marianne Hirsch writes, “a continual allegiance to the mother appears as regressive and potentially lethal; it must be transcended. Maturity can be reached only through an alignment with the paternal, by means of an angry and hostile break from the mother” (168). However, precisely because the mother-daughter relationship is conceptualized in this way—that is, as the site of intergenerational female alienation, many women writers have tried to re-imagine it as a source of strength and encouragement, though often not without conflict. Asian American feminist writers are no exception. Re- conceiving and restoring the mother-daughter relationship is even more complicated for Asian American writers as they face issues of race in addition to those of gender. Critics have long noticed the specific way these writers imagine Asian American daughters’ 86 JaeEun Yoo attempts to relate to and draw from their immigrant mothers—a relationship conventionally thought of as unbridgeable due to generation gap and culture differences. As Melinda Luisa De Jesus points out, “what U.S. third world feminist writers have added to this genre [Mother/daughter stories] is the delineation of how women of color of all generations must negotiate not only sexism in American society but its simultaneous intertwining with racism, classism, heterosexism, and imperialism” (4). Recognizing the fact that their mothers also suffer from the double yoke of gender and racial discrimination, Asian American female writers tend to focus more on the difficult but necessary communication with and connection to the mother. In these writers’ works, for an Asian American daughter to grow up as a mature individual, she must both differentiate herself from and identify with the mother. Traise Yamamoto, writing specifically about Japanese American female writers, argues that “agency and connection are crucial aspects of the mother-daughter relationship for Japanese American women: the necessity for identification with the mother relates to issues of survival and resistance,” because “the structure of racialized motherhood suggest that the mother is a crucial figure for enculturating the daughter in modes of material and psychological survival in a social realm where she will be defined by both her race and gender” (145). In this relatively short but significant tradition of Asian American writing, Julie Otsuka’s recent novel, The Buddha in the Attic (hereafter, The Buddha), stands out. The novel emphasizes the break, rather than connection, between Japanese American mothers and their daughters. Despite a strong attachment to their mothers, Lost in the Passage 87 Japanese picture brides in The Buddha are separated from them by paternal authority and physical distance. They become mothers in America, but instead of being a source of inspiration and strength, the alienation they experience from their daughters renders them helpless. Although they know their Nisei daughters will never fulfill their hope of full assimilation into American society, they cannot but watch their futile dream. The Buddha is unique in another and related sense. Before Otsuka published her previous novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, most Japanese American works that deal with World War II internment were based on the writer’s own experience. These autobiographical works display a peculiar characteristic that Selwin Cudjoe notes about African American autobiography. Analyzing Maya Angelou’s texts, Cudjoe argues that they are set in “a much more im-personal condition, the autobiographical subject emerging as an almost random member of the group, selected to tell his/her tale…. [Writing an autobiography is] a public rather than a private gesture, me-ism gives way to our-ism and superficial concerns about individual subject give way to the collective subjection of the group” (9, italics original). Shirley Geok-lin Lim also identifies a paradox common to Japanese American autobiographical writing as follows: “Even though the autobiographical impulse seeks to express a unique life, almost in contradiction, these life stories repeat a common plot of race difference and conflict with white American hegemony. They therefore come to represent something other, both more communal and more abstract than the particular life” (292). In other words, despite the definition and the requirement of the genre, most Japanese American autobiographies tend to conceive of themselves 88 JaeEun Yoo as communal projects. Thus, the “I” of typical Japanese American autobiographical writing is implicitly subsumed by “we.” In stark contrast, as a novel, The Buddha takes the collective voice of Japanese immigrant women, while their individual differences—personality, background, social status, employment, and so on—almost break free from the imposed collective subject “we.” Nevertheless, before the reader can fully appreciate the diversity of these women, and before the women can have any chance to connect with their daughters, Otsuka abruptly removes them from the narrative. The Buddha follows Japanese picture brides until they are interned in War Relocation Camps; once they are removed from their neighborhoods, the reader never gets another glimpse of them. This is another structural difference that distinguishes The Buddha from other writings on World War II internment. Most writing, including Otsuka’s previous novel, focuses on what happened to the Japanese Americans during and after the internment, whereas in The Buddha, their disappearance is both figurative and literal. This paper argues that this radical strategic difference should be read in the context of the post-9/11 era in which the novel was published. The Buddha starts with a chapter titled “Come Japanese!” Originally published as an independent short story in Granta, “Come Japanese!” portrays Japanese picture brides on their way across the Pacific Ocean to the United States. The very first sentence justifies the novel’s use of the first person plural subject by announcing the central common trait the girls share—their limited sexual experience: “On the boat we were mostly virgins” (5). What follows, however, has the opposite effect of this statement, as it shows how the girls Lost in the Passage 89 differ from each other. Starting with the next sentence, the narrative begins to describe how the girls come from vastly different regions and social classes, are of different ages, different religions, and different economic statuses, among other characteristics. The defining label of the first sentence turns out to be false, too. It is subsequently revealed that the women’s sexual experience in fact varies significantly; some of them had husbands before, and some have even given birth. Many of these so-called virgins have previously taken lovers, and some continue to do so on the ship. Indeed, all the details that follow the first sentence work against the collective “we,” ironically highlighting the rich and diverse life stories and personalities of the women on the boat. In this regard, Otsuka’s novel takes an interesting approach to the stereotypical identification scheme. Instead of demarcating an individual’s voice, she adopts a collective voice that reflects what the American public assumes about these women, only to implode this image by showing the richness of the women’s individualities, which cancel the homogenizing effects of the collective “we.” Indeed, Otsuka seems to deliberately employ the limited stereotypes that Japanese women are habitually categorized into in order to show their inadequacy. In addition to the assumed sexual naiveté, “Come Japanese!” stages an infantile image of Japanese women that was popular in the contemporary American society. Beginning from the middle 19th century, Western tourists and missionaries circulated infantilized images of Japanese, mixing exoticism with cultural condescension. Faced with the military threat of Japan, this image dramatically intensifies before and during World War II. At the center of this infantilization was the body of Japanese 90 JaeEun Yoo women as the site of sexual attraction and perverse nurturing (Yamamoto 17-8). The picture brides on the boat do appear childish when they ask trivial questions to the one white man on the boat. However, as we have already seen, they are not confined to this simplified girlish image. Their rich individuality, along with their stout resolution to leave their old life behind, problematizes and ridicules the white man’s paternal condescension toward the women. Simultaneously, Otsuka takes pains to remind the reader that this trans-Pacific voyage should not be taken as a utopian period. These women’s diversity is not designed to be read as a nostalgic longing for a lost ideal state, but rather as the women’s potential for resistance against the homogenizing social forces that are at work against them. What practically imposes the “we” on the women is not the presumed fact that they are virgins, but the fact that they are picture brides—that they have been sold by their fathers to prospective husbands. In other words, what they have in common is their relationship to their as yet unseen husbands. However, the women still retain certain forms of agency as they acknowledge that going to America is a better option than living in Japan, and thus accept their destination as their choice: “But even the most reluctant of us had to admit that it was better to marry a stranger in America than grow old with a farmer from the village” (7). This imagined agency in choosing their future is delineated through their relationship to their mothers. They have accepted going to America as their own choice, because they chose not to live like their mothers: “[O]ur mother, who knew everything, and could often read our mind, had looked at us as though we were crazy.

Load more