The Inheritors, award-winning fiction writer Asako Serizawa’s debut story collection, trains its eye both toward the past and the future to shed light on the present. The stories follow the history of one Japanese family, beginning in 1868 and spanning into the 2030’s. The family tree begins with Masayuki and Taeko, whose descendants cross continents—living across Japan, China, and the United States—but the real center of the story is Japan during the Second World War. Serizawa pieces together stories: a son lost in the firebombing of Tokyo, an officer in Japanese army who enlists to spite his left-leaning father, a woman forced to sell her body during wartime famine, a doctor struggling under the moral weight of participating in a biological warfare study during the war, and generations later, a computer programmer struggling to combat threats to the VR world he has created. The characters’ lives intertwine in fascinating ways, and the stories comment on each other to produce a brilliant and nuanced narrative that tackles historical complexities.
In an essay for Powell’s, Serizawa writes,”Inheritors took over a dozen years to finish. Researching into the gaps and silences proved trickier than I’d anticipated, and writing within the context of North America and Europe (“the West”) also posed its challenges. How to responsibly write about a fraught, contested, often dangerously oversimplified and traumatic history? How to tell stories so that they retain their diversity and partiality, each a part of the larger living mosaic, our collective trajectory?” In this same essay she describes Inheritors as a piece of historical fiction “that grapple[s] with the idea of history itself, where the details and experience can only come to the reader slivered, or shrouded, or fractured and dappled, everything, even the most intimate events, contingent on the limits of a particular perspective and, ultimately, the reticence and unreliability of human memory itself”; in other words it is something totally different from traditional historical fiction replete with lush period-specific details.
This concept of our fractured and incomplete understanding of history—whether it be world history, national history, or family history—is central to this story collection. The reader is forced to piece together the different narrative strains, which never come together fully because pieces are missing or the subjectivity of the narrator blurs the truth. This is not to say that the narrative feels disjointed or confusing in any way, but rather Serizawa has made the brilliant and philosophical choice to structure her narrative in a way that bolsters the main thread that holds the stories together—the idea that there is no such thing as a definitive history, and that time is simply a path that is always forking in different directions with different outcomes in a pattern that is not always clear to us.
This collection is a fascinating meditation on history, identity, and relationships, where each character attempts in their own way to understand their place in a larger narrative. Many of these stories touch upon the inheritance of trauma or guilt, whether it be guilt surrounding a character’s inability to share themselves fully with loved ones, or the inherited trauma of descendants of the victims or perpetrators of wartime atrocities. Serizawa hypothesizes that nothing is black and white, and these traumas demand sacrifices that can shake one’s identity to its core. In this masterfully written and conceived piece of historical fiction, Serizawa has proved that it is impossible to understand ourselves or our future without investigating our past, and that if we look hard enough, the patterns will always be there.
Further Reading: Serizawa’s O. Henry Prize-winning short story, “The Visitor”, reprinted here.