The Buddha in the Attic

I listened to this as an audiobook, though not one I'd suggest listening to aloud in public. The book follows the journey of Japanese women from being shipped to the US, sold off to husbands who were not who they were told they were, up to a few decades later at the establishment of the first internment camps (around the 1940s). The writing never pulls any punches in telling the grim truth. The pluralistic narrative is a chorus that echos a collective memory of both things that were shared or specific to one person or another. The blurring of these narratives also tunes into how these individual voices have been historically erased, ending up in vague memories that make it harder to distinguish who is who among the "We" or "They", especially emphasized with the final parts of the book.

This is an 'easy' book to read in that the format allows you to dive in and get immersed quickly in the lives of a whole population of Japanese-Americans at a specific time in our history. The format of telling fragments of multiple stories in the first person is so unusual, but so very effective. However, that doesn't mean the subject matter is easy, and having finished it I'm sitting with some uncomfortable feelings about human nature, American imperialism, and the unfathomably cruel lives that immigrants (from all time periods) have to suffer when they come to this country.