by Julie Otsuka · 10 X 18 · tapa blanda · ISBN 9782264060532
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«Certaines n'avaient jamais vu la mer» is the historical novel by Julie Otsuka, published by 10 X 18 in paperback, in French.
A group of Japanese women emigrates to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century to marry men they know only from a portrait. A chorus narrates the wedding night, the farm work, the strange language, the humiliation and the joys, until the war and oblivion. The novel gives body to these anonymous emigrants with a collective voice.
Original title: The Buddha in the Attic. Translation by Carine Chichereau. Prix Femina Étranger 2012 and finalist for the National Book Award.
Aimed at reading groups and adult readers of historical fiction.
Julie Otsuka is a Japanese-American author. She is known for drawing from her personal life to write autoethnographical historical novels about the life of Japanese Americans. In 2002 she published her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine, which is about the Japanese-American internment camps that took place in 1942-45 during World War II. The story begins in California, where she was born and raised, and it is based on Otsuka's grandfather who was arrested as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor. Her novel, in 2003, received an award from the Asian American Literary Award and American Library Association Alex Award. Otsuka continued to write about her family's history and in 2011 published her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, which takes place in the early 1900s and discusses the marriages of Japanese women who immigrated to the United States to marry men they knew only through photographs. These women are known as "picture brides" for this reason. During this year, she also published a short story titled "Diem Perdidi," that translates to "I have lost the day," which dives into a more personal space as it is based on her mother who had frontotemporal dementia. This short story was the beginning of her third novel published in 2022 titled, The Swimmers, which further relates her experience as the daughter of a mother with frontotemporal dementia.
