Julie Otsuka’s book, The Buddha in the Attic is the story of a group of Japanese picture brides who come to America in the early 1900s to marry a group of Japanese men. The women have never met their husbands before they arrive, and many are gypped into marriage by lying men who claim to have a good, middle-class life, but instead are struggling financially and need someone to help run a farm or do other manual labor. We also get to see how the brides’ American-born children assimilate into American culture. Throughout the story, the wives also contend with racism directed at them from whites, especially after Pearl Harbor. I think the internment of Japanese-Americans during the second world war is something that doesn’t get as much attention in history classes as it deserves, though hopefully this is changing now. When I was a high school and college student 15-25 years ago, we mostly focused on what was happening in Europe during that war, and I don’t remember ever being taught that Japanese people right here in America were being unjustly held as prisoners. Kudos to Julie Otsuka for teaching me that and allowing me to give that knowledge to my American literature students this semester when I taught this gem of a book for the first time. Some students were put off by the book’s narrative style. It’s told in a plural first-person. After a while, I got used to it and found the repetition rather poetic. I’ll teach it again next semester.