40 The New York Review
To Forget and Survive
Tash Aw
Inheritors
by Asako Serizawa.
Doubleday, 270 pp., $26.95;
$16.00 (paper; to be published in June)
I started reading Inheritors, Asako
Serizawa’s collection of interlinked
short stories—which spans five gen-
erations but always comes back to
Japan’s wartime trauma—a few days
after the annual Nagasaki Peace Cer-
emony last year and, it turned out, the
day before four Japanese cabinet min-
isters made an official visit to Tokyo’s
controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which
honors not only Japan’s war dead but
also officials convicted of war crimes.
The timing of my reading was coinci-
dental: for most Southeast Asians of
my generation, born in the 1970s and
after, Japan’s actions in World War II
are something we remember only from
school textbooks and have little bear-
ing on our daily lives. The same cannot
be said for my parents’ generation: each
year in the middle of August, my uncle
dutifully sends articles from Chinese-
language news channels to the family
WhatsApp group, reminding us again
of the enduring tragedy of Japan’s war-
time involvement.
My uncle, like my parents, was only
an infant during the war. But he grew
up in a region haunted by tales of the
Japanese army’s persecution of Malay-
sia’s ethnic Chinese population, an ex-
tension of the brutal conflict between
China and Japan on the Chinese main-
land that lasted longer than the war in
Europe. Among the older generations
of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia
that I know, the war remains a murky,
almost taboo subject, referred to only
in passing. News clips are the closest
they get to communicating their pain
to their younger relatives.
The drip of reports about the min-
isterial visit to Yasukuni Shrine made
me wonder how uncomplicated my own
relationship with World War II really
is, and whether I have inherited more
than I care to think of my parents’ un-
explored grief and turmoil—raising
the question of how modern Asia ad-
dresses the legacy of its historical vio-
lence. Economic growth in East Asia
during the past ten years has created a
sense of self-confidence that has in turn
diluted anti-Japanese sentiment among
the nations Japan once occupied, and
softened their criticism of the periodic
official visits to Yasukuni. Still, the
sensitivities surrounding Japan’s war-
time campaigns lurk near the surface.
In Inheritors, Luna, a young, bicultural
Berkeley professor, arrives in Japan to
deal with her father’s affairs after his
death. It is 2010, and she finds “the
whole of East Asia focused on whether
the new Japanese prime minister will
visit the Yasukuni shrine.” It takes
an outsider to articulate the dynamic.
Luna is acutely aware of the political
landscape around her:
Almost sixty- five years after the
end of the Second World War, the
battle over the narrative of history
and who might control it—her fa-
ther’s lifelong concern—seems to
be intensifying, not lessening, with
regional stability hanging in the
balance as the world, strained byold frustrations and new restless-
ness, creaks and shifts, exposing
unresolved fault lines normally
buried under market priorities.This rapid summary of a vast geopol-
itics declares the scope of the book’s
ambitions and suggests its eventual
complications. Is it possible to excavate
personal and national trauma if the
people and countries concerned would
prefer their pain to remain buried? In
the absence of clarity about what hap-
pened, how are we supposed to antici-
pate the future? Serizawa’s characters
attempt to decipher the past by track-
ing down lost relatives and unearthing
family secrets, but they wind up walk-
ing in circles. Occasional moments of
revelation succumb to a familiar, frus-
trating silence.Inheritors is a series of thirteen stories
that follow the generations of Luna’s
family for more than a century, be-
ginning with Masayuki, a rice farmer
born in Niigata in 1868, and ending
with his great- great- grandchildren in
the United States in the mid- 2030s. It
is not quite the dynastic epic suggested
by the intricate family tree printed at
the start of the book, given that the
majority of the characters remain un-
known to one another and that there
is no sense of each generation building
on the achievements of the preceding
one. If anything, this carefully mapped
genealogy serves as a reminder of the
fragility of family structures. Masayu-
ki’s descendants move away from home
and test their notions of origin and
obligation.
The first story opens in the 1980s. Ma-
sayuki’s daughter, Ayumi, is an elderly
woman with dementia whose memories
of her migration from Niigata to Cali-
fornia seven decades earlier filter backin brief snatches: her experience hiding
from the Civilian Exclusion Orders,
which brought the forcible removal of
Japanese- Americans from large parts
of the West Coast; her largely un-
eventful marriage to a white American
named Edward, who dies from a fall
while changing a light bulb; the early
tensions with her American- born chil-
dren widening over the years into an
estrangement that none of them seems
able to resist, much to their frustration.
Serizawa’s description of Ayumi’s life
is a telling way to begin a collection
about nationality, identity, and deraci-
nation. Her growing detachment from
the world, told in placid and at times
tender prose, hints at unresolved suf-
fering, as in a recollection of ice skating
in childhood:Hot sun on her shivery back. She
remembered the glint of the ice,
her slashing blades, her fear of
sliced fingers. Her skates skipped:
the surprise of hard ice on her back
and her father’s swishing blades
crisscrossing so close to her face
she could taste the metal slicing
her breath.Ayumi is one of Masayuki’s three
children and appears to be the most
fortunate, having been sent to the US
in 1911, at the age of twelve, to join a
distant relative. Marooned in her new
country in 1924, when America closed
its borders to Asian immigrants, she
escapes the most horrific consequences
of the war across the Pacific. She fears
the worst about her family’s plight in
Japan, even though she rarely mentions
them. A taxonomy of suffering is the
closest Inheritors comes to a complete
portrait of a family (the siblings, who
form the core of the book, rarely refer to
one another): with each new story, the
shifts in time, setting, and form (someflirt with noir thriller, some journalis-
tic interview, others confession) are so
dramatic that it can take the reader a
moment to adjust. In the spaces cre-
ated by these ruptures of time and
tone, the reader can’t help but measure
one character’s pain against that of the
next.
Sadao, the elder of Ayumi’s two
brothers, is a scientist involved in Ja-
pan’s biological and chemical weap-
ons program in China. He marries a
woman named Yasuko, and together
they have a son, Yasushi. At fifteen,
Yasushi runs away from home and
enlists in the Japanese army. During
the final weeks of the war, fighting in
the last stand in the Philippine Sea,
Yasushi dies in the battalions. Sadao
and Yasuko spend decades searching
for their son, wondering if he is alive,
only to have their search end in brutal
disappointment.
Masaharu, the younger brother, is a
left- wing journalist living on the mar-
gins of society in US- occupied postwar
Japan, who frequently gets in trouble
with the authorities for his political
views. To make ends meet in a devas-
tated country, his wife, Masako, finds
a secretarial job in ƿfuna, not far from
Yokohama. It seems prosaic enough
until she is recruited to work in a
brothel that serves American service-
men, not unlike the infamous practice
of sexual slavery known as “comfort
women” that the Japanese army car-
ried out during its military campaign
in Asia, forcing women from occupied
countries to work in army- run brothels.
She goes along with this not only out of
financial desperation but because she
hopes to meet someone who can help
find her son, Seiji, who disappeared at
fifteen during the bombardments of
Tokyo. In this desolate cityscape, she
and Masaharu fail to find their child
and end up adopting a Korean babyWhite doves at the Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo, 2000. The doves are considered to be possible spirits of the departed.Abbas/MagnumPhotos