The Buddha in the Attic

Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American novelist whose novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2012 and the Prix Femina étranger in France. The novel uses a remarkable collective first-person plural voice to tell the story of Japanese mail-order brides who emigrate to California in the early twentieth century. Otsuka's debut novel When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), about a Japanese American family's experience of internment during World War II, was widely acclaimed and has become a staple of American high school and college curricula. Read more →