The Buddha in the Attic
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Narrated by:
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Samantha Quan
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Carrington MacDuffie
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By:
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Julie Otsuka
About this listen
Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” - The New York Times) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago.
In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.
In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.
From the Hardcover edition
©2011 Julie Otsuka (P)2011 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
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Cather's writing is impeccable
- By Kelly on 12-20-19
By: Willa Cather
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Michael C. Hall
- Length: 2 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Golden Globe-winning actor Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under) performs Truman Capote's masterstroke about a young writer's charmed fascination with his unorthodox neighbor, the "American geisha" Holly Golightly. Holly - a World War II-era society girl in her late teens - survives via socialization, attending parties and restaurants with men from the wealthy upper class who also provide her with money and expensive gifts. Over the course of the novella, the seemingly shallow Holly slowly opens up to the curious protagonist.
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"Better to look at the sky than live there"
- By W Perry Hall on 02-12-14
By: Truman Capote
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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Owls Do Cry
- By: Janet Frame
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'
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well told but a wee bit depressing.
- By Muzza on 11-03-19
By: Janet Frame
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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
- By: Allan Gurganus
- Narrated by: Barbara McCulloh
- Length: 49 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and fans alike fell in love with the voice of 99-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the 20th century, when she was 15 and her husband was 50. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.
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Dated.
- By edie butler on 04-06-21
By: Allan Gurganus
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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All the Lives We Never Lived
- By: Anuradha Roy
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
By: Anuradha Roy
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The Probable Future
- By: Alice Hoffman
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window to the future - a future that she might not want to see.
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Nice, gentle story for when you feel bad.
- By Anonymous User on 05-28-17
By: Alice Hoffman
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Rush Home Road
- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
- By Anna on 12-16-11
By: Lori Lansens
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A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
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Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
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In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.
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What listeners say about The Buddha in the Attic
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Chiti Kaunda
- 06-28-17
A story that needs to be heard
I struggle a little bit with the writer's style - and the use of sentence series in the structure of the entire book. But then again, it is a tool to help elevate the rich diversity of Japanese Americans. To humanize their immigrant experiences and to connect their hopes and dreams to all of ours.
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- Mindful Heretic
- 03-02-23
Beautiful and intricate, poetic narrative
A beautiful rhizomatic litany of the complexity of the many experiences that often get lost when we are given "clean" narrative. I felt the forgotten and invisible summoned by this writing. Reading other reviews, I see others did not enjoy this. That is precisely the problem with lost histories we must work to relocate and commemorate. I will listen to this repeatedly and seek to think of my own ancestors in the same complex manner. Thank you for this work.
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- AuntGert
- 12-09-23
More A List Than A Novel
I was overall disappointed by this book believing that it would develop the story/character of young a Japanese immigrant bride coming to the US in the early 20th C. But the narrator uses the “royal we” in a sense lumping all the young brides into one continuum of existence within the context of the hardships of cultural estrangement, little to no personal freedoms, and enormous physical hardships.
I appreciate how difficult these young women’s lives were. But the book is more like a nonfiction essay than historical fiction in which the audience gets involved with the lives of characters as they endure.
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- AmazonCustomer
- 12-16-17
Budda In The Attic
Any additional comments?
This novel takes the point of view of several Japanese women as they are boarding a ship heading to America to start their new lives in the early 1900’s. The novel is missing the intimacy of one protagonist’s point of view and continues the groups point of view throughout the novel.
It was interesting, a good novel, not great.
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- Michael Gorham
- 09-20-19
Innovative and I learn lots of things I never knew.
I’ve never experienced that kind of writing before. I don’t even know what it’s called. But I can say very effective and very interesting. I learned more about what happened during that war from the point of view of the Japanese in the US.
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- Vanessa thomas
- 10-04-18
Beautiful
Another Literature assignment I am extremely grateful for because I probably never would have read it otherwise and it was phenomenal. The way she narrated the book as if she was all of the women as one collective conscious was just brilliant and captured something that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
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- Darwin8u
- 12-12-19
The Men They Married
“Because the only way to resist, our husbands had taught us, was by not resisting.”
― Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
I read entirely too much white male fiction. I know this. It is familiar and available. Abundant even. It is everywhere. So, I'm trying to reach beyond my normal boundaries. Read more minority voices, listen to another story. Otherwise, what good is fiction?
Julie Otsuka's little novella was quick. It checks in at 124 pages or so. But it sticks with you. It carries you*. It doesn't have one narrator, but a chorus of Japanese woman who immigrated to America in the early 20th century as mail-order brides for Japanese laborers in California. She follows this beautiful and tragic chorus of woman through a new country, a new culture, new husbands, work, loneliness, work, marriage, work, children, work, racism, and eventually the FDR's Japanese Concentration Camps of WWII (Executive Order 9066).
Newly married, living in Utah, I traveled to Delta, Utah with my wife and walked around the Topaz War Relocation Center. It was haunting. The images of dust and isolation came back to me 25-years-later as I read this book. It was written in 2011, but seems to warn us against the fear we seem to always have of the other (Mexicans, Muslims, Japanese, blacks, etc). We cage them because we don't recognize they are us. One of the lines that struck me the most from this short book was on page 124. It was the mayor of a California town speaking after the Japanese have been hauled away. Some of the words, however, came from a speech by Donald Rumsfeld in October of 2001 (before Guantanamo was a household word, before kids in cages, before black sites, and waterboarding became associated with America):
"There will be some things that people will see," he tells us. "And there will be some things that people won't see. These things happen. And life goes on."
Certainly, life will go on, but Otsuka' haunting prose; her beautiful narrative mantras; the pulsing rhythm of her Japanese chorus of women; her FPP anonymous narrators -- will all haunt me for a long time.
* Although a completely different book, I was reminded several times while reading this novella of O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'
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6 people found this helpful
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- Book
- 12-14-15
Loved this book
It make the Japanese experience personalized. I felt as though I could have been any of these women.
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- Vicki
- 08-06-12
enjoyable listen
Where does The Buddha in the Attic rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
written too much like Gothic for me, cute. third person narrative loses it at times.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 05-25-12
Eclectic & Insightful
Well presented in a collage method sort of way. Was insightful into a whole different era, culture, and challenges. Really enjoyed it and the reading.
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