The voice that speaks to us here is the “we” of the Japanese women who arrived in California in the aftermath of World War I, most of them young and inexperienced, most bearing photographs of men they had agreed to marry, sight unseen: “On the boat we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were.

There are plenty of names in Otsuka’s new novel, but this time the cast is composed of an entire community of families. In these nameless people, we confronted our own uncertainties about where we truly belong, where our loyalties lie, where we should place our trust. With their sometimes uncomfortably familiar hopes and fears, Otsuka’s characters emerged as particular individuals even as their concerns took us far beyond the particulars of the Japanese-American experience.

As the string of vignettes proceeded, the questions they asked, the observations they made, the illusions they cherished created a bond with the reader. The central figures in Otsuka’s first book, a mother and her children identified merely as “the boy,” “the girl” and “the woman,” were followed from their home in Berkeley to a barracks in the high Utah desert, then back again. While it appears to hold the characters at a formal distance, that reticence infuses their stories with powerful emotion. Like its predecessor, “The Buddha in the Attic” unfurls as a sequence of linked narratives, some no longer than a paragraph. Now she returns with a second novel, also employing a minimalist technique, that manages to be equally intimate yet much more expansive. Proof arrived almost a decade ago, long after she’d traded painting for writing, with the publication of her first novel, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” a spare but resonant portrait of one Japanese-American family’s daily life, at home and in the internment camps, during World War II. Otsuka claims to have been a failure as an artist, but she might only have erred in choosing the wrong medium.

Although Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California and trained as a painter in the Western tradition, she seems perfectly attuned to the spirit of sumi-e. Simplicity of line is prized, extraneous detail discouraged. In the Japanese art of sumi-e, strokes of ink are brushed across sheets of rice paper, the play of light and dark capturing not just images but sensations, not just surfaces but the essence of what lies within.

The buddha in the attic