The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka Read Free Book Online

complained. We never asked for a raise. For most of us were simple girls from the country who did not speak any English and in America we knew we had no choice but to scrub sinks and wash floors.
    WE DID NOT mention them in our letters to our mothers. We did not mention them in our letters to our sisters or friends. Because in Japan the lowliest job a woman could have was that of a maid. We have quit the fields and moved into a nice house in town, where my husband has found employment with a family of the first rank. I am putting on weight. I’ve blossomed. I’ve grown half an inch. I wear underwear now. I wear a corset and stockings. I wear a white cotton brassiere. I sleep in until nine every morning and spend my afternoons out of doors with the cat in the garden. My face is fuller. My hips have widened. My stride has lengthened. I am learning how to read . I am taking piano lessons. I have mastered the art of American baking and recently won first prize in a contest for my lemon meringue pie. I know you would like it here. The streets are wide and clean and you do not have to take off your shoes when you walk on the grass. I think of you often and will send money home as soon as I can .
    FROM TIME TO TIME one of their men would ask to have a word with us in his study while his wife was out shopping, and we did not know how to say no. “Is everything all right?” he would ask us. Usually we stared down at the floor and said yes, of course, everything was fine, even though this was not true, but when he touched us lightly on the shoulder and asked us if we were sure, we did not always turn away. “Nobody has to know,” he would say to us. Or, “She’s not due home until late.” And when he led us upstairs to the bedroom and laid us across the bed—the very same bed we had made up that morning—we wept because it had been so long since we’d been held.
    SOME OF THEM asked us to speak a few words in Japanese for them just to hear the sound of our voice. It doesn’t matter what you say . Some of them asked us to put on our finest silk kimonos for them and walk slowly up and down their spines. Some of them asked us to tie them up with our flowered silk sashes and call them whatever names came to mind, and we were surprised at what those names were, and how easily they came to us, for we had never before said them out loud. Some of them asked us to tell them our real names, which they then whispered to us again and again until we no longer knew who we were. Midori. Midori. Midori . Some of them told us how beautiful we were, even though we knew we were homely and plain. No man would look at me in Japan . Some of them asked us how we liked it, or if they were hurting us, and if so were we enjoying the pain, and we said yes, for we were. At least when I’m with you I know I’m alive . Some of them lied to us. I’ve never done this before . And we, in turn, lied to them. Neither have I . Some of them gave us money, which we slipped into our stockings and gave to our husbands that same evening without saying a word. Some of them promised to leave their wives for us, even though we knew they never would. Some of them found out we were pregnant by them— My husband has not touched me in more than six months —and then sent us away. “You must get rid of it,” they said to us. They said, “I will pay for everything.” They said, “I will find you employment elsewhere at once.”
    ONE OF US made the mistake of falling in love with him and still thinks of him night and day. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who beat her with a broomstick and then lay down and wept. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who divorced her and sent her back to her parents in Japan, where she now works in a silk-reeling mill in Nagano for ten hours a day. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who forgave her and then confessed to a few sins of his own. I have a second family up in Colusa . One of us said