Winner of the PEN/Open Book Award Winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award A kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations scattered across Asia and the United States, Inheritors is a heartbreakingly beautiful and brutal exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother's wife, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. Half a ...
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Winner of the PEN/Open Book Award Winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award A kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations scattered across Asia and the United States, Inheritors is a heartbreakingly beautiful and brutal exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother's wife, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father's secrets. Decades into the future, two siblings face the consequences of their great-grandparents' war as the world shimmers on the brink of an even more pervasive violence. Grappling with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war, Inheritors offers an intricate tapestry of stories illuminating the complex ways in which we live, interpret, and pass on our tangled histories.
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The tenth chapter of Asako Serizawa's novel "Inheritors" (2020) discusses at length Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" and its view of the ambiguous, contingent character of history. There are two interlocutors in Serizawa's chapter, "Pavilion" who discuss the Borges story before one of the characters fulfills his mission of killing the other. Borges's story, the philosophical discussion in the chapter, and the action of the chapter all show the complexity of Serizawa's book about the difficulty of understanding history.
In an author's note at the end of the book Serizawa writes: "this book is foremost engaged with the texts and media, scholarly, popular and fictional, that have represented and discussed this history, and the concept of history, from myriad perspectives." Serizawa writes further that the goal of her book is to show the difficulty of the concept of "historical fiction" as "an objective occurrence bound to a time and place." Instead, she hopes her book "will complicate this idea and spark questions about how history is made, how it is lived, remembered, reproduced, and used, and how ultimately unbound it is by the time and place in which it is grounded. The Second World War didn't start and end with specific people and events: its roots reach back to values seeded long ago, and its sundering effects have hardly lost their spark and propulsion."
The need for the author to explain her goals and some of her sources in a note at the end of the book is a sign of the unsatisfactory nature of "Inheritors". The book deteriorates markedly with the lengthy, wordy discussion of the Borges story, interesting as it might be in itself. The author is reduced to talking about her theme, and in a confusing way, rather than in showing it. So too, the book loses whatever coherence it may have had in the futuristic, preachy section with which it ends.
"Inheritors" is a commendably ambitious work for a first novel. As Serizawa says, it is more a series of interrelated vignettes which cover the history of a Japanese family from 1913 into the present and future through 2035. The family tree and chronology at the beginning of the book don't offer much help in allowing the reader to follow the story. With sections in the United States at the beginning and end of the work, the book revolves around WW II in Japan as recounted from various perspectives in a series of incidents. The book does not spare the reader the brutality of Japan's war of colonization and imperialism, and the terrible brutality and destruction of the fighting. The book also shows the suffering resulting from American occupation in the War's aftermath.
The thirteen separate chapters of the book are most effective when the incidents are described in detail through the perspective of one of the characters. The effective sections of the book also work in other textual materials, stories, and histories effectively. The writing is often lyrical and beautiful. The book is better in particular details and in encouraging the reader to reflect. It does not convince in its own rambling meditations about the course of history, such as in the discussion of Borges or in the concluding sections and in other parts. The book does not cohere and it does not hang together well.
Although it includes sections of beautiful perceptive writing, I found "Inheritors" ultimately unsatisfactory both as a work of literature and as a meditation on history and philosophy.
