The Buddha in the attic, by Julia Otsuka

Otsuka again mines the subject she so memorably explored in When the Emperor was divine, the Japanese immigrant experience in America. In the earlier book, she concentrated on the World War II internment camps, and the experience of one family, husband, wife, son and daughter, who are never given names which gives the book a universal feel. In The Buddha in the attic, she culminates the book (it isn’t really a “novel” in the traditional sense) with the Japanese internment, but traces their history back to the arrival of “picture brides” at the turn of the twentieth century. More of a long tone poem, it is reminiscent of Tim O’Brien’s The things they carried, still one of the best evocations of the Vietnamese Conflict. Haunting and affecting. 144 pp.