Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She is the author of the novel When the Emperor Was Divine, and a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, was nominated for the 2011 National Book Award. E-Book Overview Way upstairs there are four secrets hidden. Blond, beautiful, innocent little secrets, struggling to stay alive. Flowers In the Attic The four Dollanganger children had such perfect lives -- a beautiful mother, a doting father, a lovely home. Then Daddy was killed in a car accident, and Momma could no longer support the family. To begin with, this study attempts to describe the diaporic phenomenon of Japanese women who came to America as picture brides in Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic. Not only narrating the the story of picture brides in America, The Buddha in the Attic also tells the story of Japanese migrants who ended up in concentracion camps during From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times. On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly The Buddha in the Attic. Her short story, "Whites," which is another excerpt from The Buddha in the Attic, was published by Harper's. Her work has also appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2012 and The Best American Non-required Reading 2012. Otsuka she says she writes every day at her local café. An Interview with Julie Otsuka In addition, when the Japanese picture brides in Julie Otsuka's novel "The Buddha in the Attic" arrive in America, socially manufactured categories such as gender and ethnicity in the United States have destroyed whatever sense of self-identity they may have had prior to their arrival in the United States.