What we dreamed of

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What we dreamed of (original title: The Buddha in the Attic ) is a novel by the American author Julie Otsuka, first published in 2011, about women and girls born in Japan who emigrated to the USA in the 1920s to marry Japanese immigrants. He describes their life experiences in their new homeland until around a quarter of a century later the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor led to the internment of Americans of Japanese descent .

The novel, translated into German by Katja Scholtz and published by Mare Verlag in 2012, was received positively by literary critics . In 2011 he was nominated for a National Book Award , in the same year he was awarded the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction and in 2012 received the PEN / Faulkner Award and the Prix ​​Femina Étranger .

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The novel has no plot in the sense that specific people go through an individual fate. Instead, it is told in the we-form and reflects the impressions and experiences of girls and women who leave Japan by ship to marry emigrants of Japanese origin in California, whom they usually only know from photos or letters.

The first chapter presents the origin and hope of the so-called "picture brides" (photo brides):

“On the ship, most of us were virgins. We had long black hair and flat, wide feet, and we weren't very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice porridge when we were young girls, and our legs were slightly crooked, and some of us were only fourteen and young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city and wore fashionable city clothes, but mostly we came from the country and on the ship we wore the same old kimonos we had worn for years - worn clothes by our sisters that had been patched and dyed many times. "

The girls and women may miss their mothers and their village life, but on the basis of the few letters and one photo of their husbands they are full of hope for their new life in the USA: on arrival they realize that it was not their husbands who were advertised them in the letters with the beautiful handwriting, but that these came from professional letter writers. And that the photo of her husband leaning against a white picket fence in a suburban house or a Ford Model T is twenty years old and suggests a social advancement that never happened. Their husbands are not the successful businessmen, as they claimed to be in their letters, but simple farm workers and servants.

The second chapter deals with the first sexual act with their new husbands. The sentences always start the same over four pages:

“That night our new husbands took us quickly. [...] They took us greedily, hungrily, as if they had been waiting for us for centuries. […] They took us the way our fathers took our mothers home in the village night after night: suddenly and without warning, when we were about to fall asleep. [...] They took us with more skill than we had experienced before, and we knew that we would always want them ... "

The third chapter describes the life of women in their new homeland and their relationship with their American neighbors and employers, for whom, as Asians, they are only second class. Many of the women become migrant workers who move with their husbands to places where cheap farm labor is in demand because grapes or strawberries are ripening. Others live in the servant dwellings of wealthy families in the suburbs, and some toil in the small businesses run by their husbands.

The next chapter focuses on their children, who often only want to speak English and are ashamed of their immigrant parents who still do not speak English correctly and without an accent. It is also indicated, however, that many of their parents achieved their first modest prosperity. They go out to dinner occasionally, even if they call beforehand to find out if the restaurant also serves Japanese. They own their own piece of land, their own laundry or have opened their own restaurant.

The next chapter describes how the lives of Japanese-born American women changed after the attacks on Pearl Harbor: they are increasingly finding that their husbands are arrested without warning. In the penultimate chapter, their fears finally come true: They are forced to leave their homes and are to be taken to camps. The novel closes with a drastic change of perspective: from the point of view of their white neighbors, it is described how they are suddenly no longer there, how they are initially missing, but are gradually forgotten.

Reviews

Alice Stephens prefaces her review for The Washington Independent with some historical information: In the late 19th century, Japanese workers were recruited for the sugar plantations in Hawaii , and a number of these Japanese farm workers managed to emigrate to the US mainland, especially in To settle in California, where they found employment as cheap farm laborers. In 1907 there was a so-called gentlemen's agreement between Japan and the increasingly xenophobic United States: the further immigration of Japanese was ended. However, children and wives were allowed to join them. Until 1924, when this practice also ended, many Japanese living in the United States used marriage agencies to find a Japanese bride for themselves. An entry in a Japanese marriage register legalized the connection and enabled Japanese women to emigrate to the United States, where they met husbands they had never met before. In her review, Stephens warns the reader that it is not a conventional novel, that there is no protagonist, no plot, and no dialogue, and doubts whether it deserves to be called a novel. Rather, it is a wonderful emakimono , a hand roll in which hand-painted miniatures develop into a story for the viewer.

In his review for Der Spiegel, Johan Dehoust emphasizes the unusual narrative perspective and the pull it can develop on the reader. He calls the voices of the narrators a "powerful, oracular choir that casts a spell over you and never lets go". Otsuka, an American of Japanese descent, who in her epilogue names the numerous historical sources with which she has dealt with when writing the novel, breaks all narrative principles with her novel. However, she has a wonderful ability to unfold a whole story in a single sentence. Some chapters, writes Dehoust, are like mantras , because sometimes every sentence begins with the same words across pages.

In her review for The New York Times, Alida Becker compares Otsuka's narrative style with the minimalism of Japanese drawing. From Becker's point of view, what we were dreaming of is actually the prelude to Otsuka's first published novel, When the Emporen was Divine (When the Emperor was immortal) , which was not translated into German . In this novel, Otsuka describes the experience of a (anonymous) Japanese-American woman and her two children during World War II , who were sent from their suburban life in Berkeley to an internment camp in the Utah desert . Becker also emphasizes how powerful this choir of voices becomes that Otsuka lets out: It emphasizes both the individuality of each fate and their commonalities.

Elizabeth Day is almost euphoric in her review for the British newspaper The Guardian and calls Otsuka's novel a small, narrative jewel that is so polished that its sentences will stay in the reader's memory for a long time. With What We Dreamed of , Julie Otsuka has developed her own literary style that is half lyric , half narrative : short sentences, few descriptions, so that the emotions that can be felt in each chapter only become more urgent through this reluctance. Elizabeth Day is also amazed that Otsuka manages to keep up her unusual narrative perspective. Day notes that Otsuka's narrative brilliance lies in the fact that she succeeds in making the reader feel connected to this group of characters because he repeatedly recognizes individual fates in this collective experience.

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Single receipts

  1. ↑ Ron Charles: Julie Otsuka's 'The Buddha in the Attic' wins 2012 PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction . In: Washington Post , March 26, 2012. Retrieved March 25, 2016. 
  2. ↑ Otsuka: What we dreamed of, beginning of the first chapter in the translation by Katja Scholtz.
  3. ↑ Otsuka: What we dreamed of, beginning of the second chapter in the translation by Katja Scholtz.
  4. ↑ Alice Stephens: The Buddha in the Attic: This novella captures in prose poem form the immigrant experience of Japanese picture brides in California. In: Washington Independent , August 30, 2011, accessed March 27, 2016.
  5. ↑ Johan Dehoust: Novel "What we dreamed of" - fruit pickers instead of silk merchants. On Spiegel Online on August 13, 2012, accessed on March 25, 2016.
  6. ^ Alida Becker: Coming to America, Lured by a Photo . In: The New York Times , August 26, 2011, accessed March 26, 2016.
  7. ↑ Elizabeth Day, April 8, 2012 book review in The Guardian , accessed March 27, 2016