In the 1920’s a large number of young Japanese women travelled to Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States as “picture brides”. These women were lured by letters and photos of potential working men in the USA, however the men sent old, retouched or even fake photos of themselves posing with luxury items that they did not own. After travelling by boat to their location these brides were met by grooms who were between 10-15 years older than their brides and then taken to live in squalid living conditions. Generally plantations that practiced segregation of the Japanese workers.
Julie Otsuka’s novel follows innumerable tales of these
brides. It is not a novel that follows a single bride, nor a group of families,
but more a collection of brides. In a poetic style that is raw, short and
sparse we follow these women through their harrowing ordeal. The novel opens
with the brides on the boat:
On the boat the first thing we
did – before deciding who we liked and didn’t like, before telling each other
which one of the islands we were from, and why we were leaving, even before
bothering to learn each other’s names – was compare photographs of our
husbands. They were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair
and skin that was smooth and unblemished. Their chins were strong. The posture,
good. Their noses were straight and high. They looked like our brothers and
fathers back home, only better dressed, in gray frock coats and fine Western
three-piece suits. Some of them were standing on sidewalks in front of wooden A-frame
houses with white picket fences and neatly mowed lawns, and some were leaning
in driveways against Model T Fords. Some were sitting in studios on stiff
high-backed chairs with their hands neatly folded and staring straight into the
camera, as though they were ready to take on the world. All of them had promised
to be there, waiting for us, in San Francisco, when we sailed into port.
Fifteen of the twenty four sections in chapter one begin
with the phrase “on the boat” and every subsequent chapter is similar in style.
We follow the women through their journey, their reality upon arrival, their
living conditions, their pregnancies, their growing children, their employment,
their exclusion and eventually what happens to them once World War Two
commences.
Interestingly enough there is a quote attributed to Donald
Rumsfeld from October 12, 2001 used as a speech by the local mayor and if I
hadn’t read the acknowledgements I wouldn’t have known. It did not look out of
place. In fact there were numerous sections that could relate to different
races in the right here and now:
It was all, of course, because of
the stories in the papers. They said that thousands of our men had sprung into
action, with clockwork precision, the moment the attack on the island had
begun. They said we had flooded the roads with our run-down trucks and
jalopies. They said we had signalled to the enemy planes with flares from our
fields. They said that the week before the attack several of our children had
bragged to their classmates that “something big” was about to happen. They said
that those same children, when questioned further by their teachers, had
reported that their parents had celebrated the news of the attack for days. They were shouting banzais. The said
that in the event of a second attack here on the mainland anyone whose name
appeared on the list would more than likely rise up to assist the enemy. They
said our truck farmers were foot soldiers in a vast underground army. They’ve got thousands of weapons down below
in the vegetable cellars. They said that our houseboys were intelligence
agents in disguise. They said that our gardeners were all hiding shortwave
radio transmitters in their garden hoses and when the Pacific zero hour struck
we’d get busy at once. Burst dams. Burning oil fields. Bombed bridges. Blasted
roads. Blocked tunnels. Poisoned reservoirs. And what was to stop one of us
from walking into a crowded marketplace with a stick of dynamite tied to our
waist? Nothing.
This is a simple but disturbing read about a generation that
has almost been forgotten by the history books, a lament for people long gone
but at the same time highlighting the current methods we still employ. Although
a poignant tale I did find some of the style quite jarring and repetitive but
that’s simply personal taste.
Even though a winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for fiction
in 2012 I personally can’t see this novel lifting the IMPAC gong, all three I’ve
read before this (“The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Get”, “The Map and the
Territory” and “From The Mouth Of The Whale”) all rate higher for me than this
novel. The winner will be announced next Thursday 6/6/13.
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