New York, NY: Doubleday Books/Penguin Random House, 2020. 288 pages. $26.95.
Asako Serizawa’s first book of fiction begins with a crumbling memory. Eighty-two-year-old Ayumi can no longer remember the names of her children or the streets in her neighborhood. Unanchored from recent decades, she drifts through earlier ones: a few bright triumphs in her tomato garden, her transplantation from Japan to California and her marriage to a white American, and punctuations of a near century of anti-Asian sentiment. While Ayumi’s history slips away from her, a character in the next story is seized by a new one. Masaaki learns in adulthood that he was not born to his Japanese parents, but to a Korean conscript enslaved as part of the labor force building the war bunker for Japan’s emperor—a secret that turns out to exert a greater gravity on him than on his wife and daughters in the United States.
Inheritors is a book of memories that can’t be outrun and histories that must not be forgotten. Though many of these interconnected stories take place outside World War II, none are outside its grasp. After that initial couplet of stories, Serizawa plunges into the black heart of the war, exploring both characters who suffer the war’s abuses and characters who commit them. “Train to Harbin,” a story awarded both an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize after its initial publication, is the darkest of these, a mealymouthed apologia from a doctor who conducted biological experiments on Chinese prisoners during the war. He seems to speak for the collection when he writes of “choices as elusive now as they had been then. After all, it was war. An inexcusable logic, but also a fact. We adapted to the reality over which we felt we had no control.”
Serizawa draws a world in which perpetrators and victims alike must adapt nimbly to a wildly changing set of rules, dictated by the Tokkō thought police one year and occupying American GIs the next. Characters on a train hush nervously as two American soldiers talk, “their rapid back-and-forth reminding everyone of how decisions were made these days: from on high and in a language as inaccessible as their own Emperor’s had been.” In the broken postwar society, Serizawa’s characters struggle for food and money, for survival more than life. A leftist journalist who can’t find work tails his wife to discover her second job is in a high-traffic brothel for American soldiers. Years later, a documentarian takes that woman to task for conflating her trials there with those of the sexual slaves in Japan’s system of “Comfort Women.”
Serizawa assembles careful layers, a moral labyrinth that may have no exits. A mother in “The Visitor,” looking at a picture of a her son and other soldiers lined up to bayonet prisoners into a mass grave thinks, “I realized that their expressions were in fact identical, both parties bound by the same fear, the attackers anticipating the same moment of piercing anticipated by the victims.” Can this mother be blamed for convincing herself that her son leaked this photo in an act of conscientiousness? Can that son be forgiven for the simpleminded patriotism that leads him into the army and, in a later story, into piloting a Kaiten, the manned-torpedo equivalent of the better known Kamikaze planes?
The author does not offer condemnation, but Serzawa is unmistakably and keenly aware of every compromise and failing. It’s all inexcusable logic, but also a fact.
Inheritors is called a collection of interconnected stories, but the stories reflect and transmute each other. The characters are bound together across more than a century by the family tree in the front of the book, and one character’s testimony often completes—or complicates—another’s. The book resists the label of novel, but even more so resists the label of collection. The stories don’t move forward a unified plot, but they do present a unified collage, a mosaic of a single anguished face.
If that makes the book sound dark, it is. Inheritors offers a heavy and often painful read. Serizawa captures the brutal physical details of war in sometimes excruciating detail: a boy is beaten until he has “a face like a plate of soft vegetables”; a mother flees during a firebombing with her baby’s head “running like an egg.” The gruesome descriptions are rare, but there’s an equal toll to the type of witness Serizawa offers and asks the reader to bear.
But the book—the collection or novel or collage—takes an interesting turn in its last third, when it launches back into the present, to characters struggling to hear the echoes of those stories from the war. A daughter tries to unravel the story of her father’s life in Japan after he deserted them. That father was in Japan, vainly trying to untie the tangle of his own past. The strongest of the collection’s interconnections is here, between two characters with switched lives: Seiji, who was permanently separated from his parents when their town was bombed, and Masaaki, who was adopted by those parents in the years after. Masaaki, that son of a Korean labor slave and, mostly likely, a sex slave, inherits the privilege intended for Seiji.
In “Pavilion,” the two connect in old age to discuss the eerie coincidences in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and its bearing on their own intertwined destinies. The shift is an intriguing one, moving from the viseralities of warfare and the drifting currents of memory, to an unguarded philosophical conversation about free will versus determinism and whether the repeating disaster loop in human history has any chance of interruption. This essayistic story adds a new facet to the collection, melting and recasting it into a meditation on whether massive tragedies are inevitable. The collection closes brilliantly with a pair of stories enlarging that focus, peering into a future in which the children or grandchildren of those characters, for whom the great wars of the past are a Wikipedia entry, try to determine whether the world will lurch into ecological ruin with an equal blindness.
Inheritors reveals an author of fierce intellect looking at war legacies from this angle and that, working her way into their nuances. By deconstructing the toolkit of the novel, Serizawa dodges the inevitability of a war narrative to offer a wistful hope or a melodramatic tragedy. Instead, she creates a more powerful form in which she can align the pieces to magnify each other like the lenses of a telescope. This powerful, intelligent book stands in the company of William T. Vollman and W.G. Sebald and their investigations of life during wartime or in the long shadow after. But the tone, the structure, and the territory are all Serizawa’s, in a book that deserves to become a crucial pillar in the literature of war.