The Buddha in the Attic (2011) by Julie Otsuka: An Intersectional Reading

Year 2022, Issue: 56, 3 - 22, 01.11.2022

Nadia Abdelhadi Yasmina Djafrı

Abstract

While this article is not another lament on the murkiness of
intersectionality, neither theoretically nor analytically, it is a contention
that the interplay of various identity markers undeniably contributes to
sketch a unique painful woman experience that deserves considerable
reflection. In this respect, Julie Otsuka’s fictional work; The Buddha in
the Attic (2011), could be read through an intersectional lens that opens
ground for the interrogation of a gendered corrupted past, a past that
holds the lot of racial immigration. This article, accordingly, operates
on the historiographic nuance of this fictional work, whereby Julie
Otsuka’s ventures to excavate forgotten stories of former Japanese
immigrant women during the Second World War. With the reliance on
an unconventional narrative structure; reported from the perspective
of the first plural personal pronoun ‘we’-referred to as the ‘choral
narrator’- Julie Otsuka employs a narrative mode which helps individual
subjectivities collide very subtly to celebrate a collective consciousness
that desperately seeks recognition and identification. Throughout the
narrative process, Otsuka re-imagines, extrapolates, even manipulates
and selects elements of history by accentuating the painful experiences
of these diasporic subjects as Japanese immigrant women struggling
to find their place in America, regardless of the disillusionment that
emanates from the consequences of the odd junctions of their lives,
delineating the contours of oppression, discrimination and other forms
of social inequality and personal malaise. Based on the postulate that
Otsuka appropriates the stories of former Japanese immigrant women as
she mourns their lives in America and commemorates their resistance,
two main issues are at the core of this debate: how is it that Otsuka
highlights the particular interplay that oscillates between gender, race,
and immigration in the lives of her women ancestors? And, how would
her resort to the past help her understand the present of the diasporic
subjects in contemporaneity?

Keywords

Identity, Intersectionality, Japanese Women, Immigration

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