This performance is part of the Palanga Japanese Arts and Culture Festival part of the event.
A one-part play based on the novel by Julie Otsuka
The novel "Buddha in the Attic" by the Japanese-American writer J. Otsuka (published in Lithuanian several years ago) was immediately noticed and awarded important American literary prizes. The book is based on true stories of Japanese emigrants who left Tokyo for the USA in the early 20th century: after the First World War, Japanese men sailed to San Francisco to look for work - later, some of them returned to Japan after earning money, while others stayed in America and started starting families. They would send a photo (not necessarily a real one) to Japan and wait for the bride, who had chosen her future husband from the photograph.
The author follows the footsteps of the “photo brides” – she travels with them on a grueling ship journey to America, watches their first meeting with their future husband, the collapse of their dreams of a magical life in America. The daily rituals continue until the fateful morning of Pearl Harbor, after which the Japanese in America were evicted en masse from their homes, taken away and hidden – they simply disappeared like a mist, as if they had never existed.
"Buddha in the Attic" is a story about the fate of emigrants. In a way, it is reminiscent of today's emigration, as well as the era of the occupation of Lithuania and the Siberian exile, when thousands of people were quietly "wiped" off the map of Lithuania and the world, and the Holocaust period in Europe. It is a sensitive story about one's roots, connection with the past and ancestors in the era of the mixing of the world's nations, about the identity of the nation as a strength and a way to survive.
The creator and director of the performance, Birutė Mar, studied traditional Nihon Buyo dance and Noh theater in Tokyo and has published a book of Japanese diaries, Kokoro ("The Gorge").