Hurricane Irene has now become a pelting force. I have been reading Julie Otsuka's
The Buddha in the Attic in its dark and fearsome shadow. I'm not entirely sure how long I will have power, and there is much I'd like to say. But for now, and briefly, I want to share this with those of you in the still-electrified regions of our country: Julie Otsuka (the author of the contemporary classic (and one of my favorite books)
When the Emperor was Divine) writes important books. Deeply penetrating, remarkably researched, wholly intimate miniature novels that aren't novels at all, perhaps, but something else—urgent evocations, perhaps, or searing incantations.
Otsuka's focus, in
Buddha, is on the young Japanese women who arrived by boat shortly after World War I to meet the men they had agreed to marry and to begin lives that would never be the lives that they'd imagined. They are taken, many of them roughly, to bed. They are put to work in farms or in the houses of the rich. They bear children and they lose children and they have favorites among their children, and their children will grow up with an American sound and smell, with attitude and shame. When the next war begins, these lives will be savaged once again by the American paranoia that led to the building of the Japanese intern camps.
I keep saying "they" and "these" because this is a story told in the third-person plural. A
we came, we did, we loved, we lost, we hoped, we were taken from tale. That may sound like a peculiar story-telling choice, and indeed, it does, in places, box Otsuka in, forcing a sameness of sentence superstructure, as well as a sameness of variation from that superstructure. "On the boat we were mostly virgins," she begins, continuing:
We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.
Can you sustain a book with a third-person plural? Can you make it matter? In this slender book, Otsuka does by offering a suite of detail-saturated, devastating chapters with titles like "Come, Japanese!," "First Night," "Whites," "Babies," and "Traitors." Only the last chapter, "A Disappearance," gives voice to the Americans who wonder, in the wake of the Japanese evictions, where their neighbors, school mates, grocery store clerks, maids have gone.
The rain is a sleeting as I type this. The news warns of apocalyptic floods, of communities remade, of evacuations; it tells of children already lost to the thunder crash of trees. I read
Buddha against this backdrop. I was moved toward a deep sadness for lives long ago lost.
It doesn't get any easier saying goodbye. I don't expect it ever will. I look into my son's eyes, I sit with him, we talk, and everything is right with the world. Everything else disappears.
While my son was home he read one of my favorite thin books, When the Emperor Was Divine. He declared it (very) good. A boy after my own heart. Of my own heart. Always.
I wrote recently of my hope to re-visit favorite books, and (though the weather changed, and a friend stopped by, and one new client project started while another ended) I've stayed the course. Rediscovering the crystalline pleasures of When the Emperor was Divine, for example, Julie Otsuka's slender novel about the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s. Five voices tell this tale in five exquisite chapters—the mother who discovers the evacuation orders, the daughter observing her disappearing world, the son who wanders about the internment camp, the son and daughter (a magnificent 'we') upon returning to a battered home in a prejudiced world, and the father who had been taken from them all much earlier. Five chapters. The cresendo of simple sentences. The power of quotidian detail. A book that every person should read—young adults especially. I was not disappointed in my return to this book. I wondered where Julie Otsuka, trained as a painter, might be now, what she is writing.
Yesterday I re-read Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, another narrow, artful volume, this one by Harriet Scott Chessman. The story of the painter, Mary Cassatt, and her sister, Lydia, dying of Bright's disease and serving as Mary's muse and model. A simple story, simply told—where plot is what a dying woman chooses to love, and how she helps her sister let her go. Excerpts from historic correspondence webbed right into the dialogue, the narrative. These final words: I yearn to be simply present in this day, filled for the moment with color and shape, my own hand urging the needle through the silk.
Today I'll take a new book on the train with me—Andrea Barrett's multi-voiced historical novel The Air We Breathe. Later in the week I'll be reading one classic I've never read (forgive me), Brideshead Revisited, and this weekend, while en route to San Antonio for the ALAN panel, I'll be reading John Berger's From A t0 X: A Story in Letters. All three books picked up at the local bookstore on Sunday, as part of my pledge to buy books and more books through this economic downturn.
Rare to find myself with this tunnel of reading time. Grateful for the whisking away, always.
There hadn't been time in a long time to return to my shelf of books, but this morning I did. I felt like I do on those Saturday mornings when I leave in the near-dark for the Farmer's Market and stand (in advance of jostling crowds) before cases of fresh cheese, fat shrimp, silk chocolate, blueberry muffins. Rich. That's how I felt.
I pulled Elizabeth Graver's Awake to my lap and read again the last 50 or so pages—one of the finest renderings of maternal guilt and regret that I have ever read. I pulled down Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine and decided to read it all the way through again tomorrow, so that I could remember fully why I loved it so much a few years ago. I took Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses into my hands, and resolved to read it again on Sunday. I returned to The Cellist of Sarajevo and remembered: Another book of multiple voices, masterfully done.
And then I started reading Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, and oh my, truly. Have you ever seen so much poetry in a novel's opening lines? Almost like reading Carole Maso's Ava—every detail an awakening, a surprise.
For you today, then, from Hansen:
Crickets.
Mooncreep and spire.
Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther water spout....
Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar.
White hallway and dark mahogany joists. Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.
Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.
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I hope you're doing okay up there! At least you're surrounded by all kinds of great books...and hopefully your iPad was charged up. :)