One of the more intriguing things about Buddha is Otsuka's use of the plural point of view. Her employment of the pronoun "we" is a brilliant approach to the construction of her narrative and allows the novel to tell a collective story. It is a story gleaned from individual stories but told in a way that says this belongs to all of us. An individual narrator with a name is never identified, but the reader still has every sense of just how personal the story actually is. This bit of craftsmanship is quite striking and I was amazed at how such a small and subtle difference in word usage can do something as powerful as make an account so personal by the very virtue of its anonymity. In the interview with Edwards, Otsuka spoke about the technique as indicative of a marker of Japanese culture as well in the way it is more focused on the group than on the individual. It was also fascinating for me to hear her talk about the difficulty she had with the writing process when starting from the "I" point of view, saying that it was only when she tried the "we" that the work came together and began to take meaningful shape.
Both books from Otsuka address the lives of Japanese immigrants to America in the years before World War Two with The Buddha in the Attic told through the eyes of so-called "picture brides" who were sent to America to wed the Japanese men already here. This was a practice that was simply a long distance version of the arranged marriages that were customary in Japan, but Otsuka claimed also in her interview with Bob Edwards that if a white woman had chosen to marry a Japanese immigrant, she would have been stripped of her American citizenship, so the men were also left with little other choice when it came to seeking spouses. Dealt with in both books but more central in When the Emperor Was Divine are the effects of the internment of over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans into "relocation camps" during the war. It is important to point out that well over half of the people sent away during this time to the camps were full citizens of the United States. This is one of those dark and little remembered chapters in our country's history, though it should be easy to understand the context of such an event given the state of the world in our own time and especially given the pervasiveness of fear and of the treatment of Muslim Americans in the years after September 11th. Still, it is difficult to imagine such a thing occurring today and it seems unbelievable that it has been nearly forgotten. Entire families simply disappeared. A classmate at the next desk over may have literally been there one day and gone the next. Houses and personal property were abandoned to whatever may come in the absence of the owners or sold at a tremendous financial and personal loss to them. Jobs and businesses and livelihoods were to be left behind with no inkling at all of when or how they might be reclaimed. It all just seems amazingly unimaginable to me, the fact that in the relatively recent past we could have corralled up and placed behind fences one hundred thousand of our own citizens simply out of mistrust. And Otsuka writes of those people and their stories magnificently.
Which brings me to the book I finished last, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. I find myself wanting for words as I am troubled by this novel and think it will be one that may need to stew a bit. Johnson also tells a story of mistrusted citizens, and it is in particular the story of one citizen who may also be thought of as anonymous, for over the course of the book he takes on different identities. This book is another bit of craftsmanship as the writer has assembled it in such a way as to make us wonder exactly which version of the story is the truth. The narrative itself becomes an illustration of the confusion and paranoia in which the people of North Korea must daily try to eke out their lives. The best they may hope to do in order to survive is to simply endure while they are forced to accept whatever truth is put before them. There are some brutal scenes and moments of utter and horrific suffering here. Those scenes and most of the first half of the book are written in a bit of a flat, matter-of-fact tone, but it is language through which a reader can feel the drudgery of what life there must be like. As the novel progresses through its second half and the main character develops over the course of years though, Johnson's writing becomes more and more fluid and he offers here and there some especially moving passages. This one is particularly good and speaks to questions raised by both Johnson and Otsuka in their books.
"Sun Moon came to him. In her hands was a hand-painted chang-gi board. The look on her face said, How can I abandon this? He'd told her that they could take nothing with them, that any keepsake might signal their plan.
'My father,' she said, 'It's all I have of him.'
He shook his head. How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live -- you could see it go out of him -- when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you love safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away."
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