Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came for the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs form our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times.Īs an introduction, this style of narration intrigues. 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. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. To refuse to give the women names seems a continuation of their separateness, keeping them at a distance even from the reader: By doing so, she forces the reader to bear witness to their victimization again and again. She then lists all the possible outcomes for the women. Marginalized by the dominant society, Otsuka further obscures their identities by both keeping them nameless, and, in a post-modern ploy, using the ‘we’ narrator. Told in eight sections, the story shares the lives of a group of women who come to the United States as mail-order brides in the 1920’s. A finalist for the National Book Award this year, Julie Otsuka’s beautifully poetic second novel, The Buddha In The Attic, seems to question the very nature of narrative.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |