Inheritors
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Serizawa follows a winding maze through a Japanese family's history in her dynamic debut collection. A family tree beginning with Masayuki (born in 1868) and continuing through to Mai (born in 2013) creates the work's backbone, as Serizawa constructs a nonlinear narrative filled with abrupt turns, accidental betrayals, and supposed curses and myths. The opening story, "Flight" (covering 1911 1981), follows Masayuki's daughter, Ayumi, as she loses some of her memories while others become more vivid. In the collection's standout, "Train to Harbin," Ayumi's doctor brother contemplates his youthful nationalism in the years just after WWII and his role in the wartime occupation of China. In "Luna," set in 1986, Ayumi's Japanese-American grand-niece Luna learns her father, Masaaki, was adopted and is of Korean heritage (not Japanese, as he believed), leading her to recall her earliest memories of visiting Japan. In "Passing," set in 2010, Luna returns to Japan to collect Masaaki's possessions and ruminates not on "where he belonged" but "how he wanted to fit in." The final two stories, "The Garden" and "Echolocation," jump into the future to investigate the fallacies of perception and what cyber warfare might look like after Mai's brother, Erin, develops a global VR climate simulator for predicting disaster. By showing Japan as both colonizer and colonized, Serizawa delivers an elegant, stimulating web of stories.
