The immense power of this short book is in the masterful writing, which is so eloquent and exquisite that these words of prose are as close to poetry as prose can ever become.

Beginning with the trip on the boat from Japan to San Francisco, the story continues with the young women's first night with their new husbands, their hardworking lives doing backbreaking, exhausting labor, their birth experiences, their children, and their deportation to Japanese internment camps during World War II. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.' The brilliance of this literary ploy is that author Julie Otsuka can better tell the sweeping, tragic story of the whole, rather than focusing on only one story that is not representative of the entire experience.Īnd tragic it is. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. The first few sentences set the linguistic style for the rest of the novel: 'On the boat we were mostly virgins. What makes this book so unusual is that it is told in the first person plural using the pronouns 'we,' 'us,' and 'our' (instead of 'I,' as is typically done in the first person) by an unnamed narrator without named characters to populate the story. It is the story of the Japanese 'picture brides' who were sent to the United States in the early 20th century to marry Japanese men, who mostly needed another set of hands to do farm work and someone to warm their beds at night.

This very short novel-really, more a novella-is one of the most powerful and poignant books I have ever read. Brilliant, Eloquent Writing: This Is One of the Most Powerful and Poignant Books I Have Ever Read

Buddha in the attic julie otsuka