The Buddha in the Attic is Julie Otsuka’s follow-up to the novel When the Emperor was divine (2002) and similar to that, it is a historical fiction work which deals with Japanese-Americans problems. The situation is even worse for their children they are caught between two different cultures to neither of them they belong fully ̶ they belong to neither Japan nor America. Moreover, as the “picture brides” ̶ who represent the whole Japanese-Americans ̶ emigrate to America with fervent hopes of reaching American Dream and living there happily, it gets revealed that although they expected to finally feel joy and comfort there, they remain poor and dislocated. The Japanese-Americans in The Buddha in the Attic do anything to fit into the American society and culture and get their approval. A close scrutinizing of the novel reveals Otsuka’s grave concern ̶ as a Japanese-American herself ̶ for the Japanese emigrants living in America the troubles they have faced and the mistreats they have suffered in America as an ethnic group. Bhabha’s notions of “unhomeliness”, “ambivalence” and “mimicry”. This study looks at Julie Otsuka’s renowned novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011), in the light of its representation of the mental and psychological colonization of Japanese emigrants in America.
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