March 25, 2021 41
whom they name Masaaki and who
becomes an academic in the United
States. Masaaki only learns of his an-
cestry on a visit to Japan in the 1980s,
at which point he abandons his wife
and daughters, including Luna, in the
US—a sort of voluntary death of the
immigrant dream that mirrors Ayumi’s
slow decline.
The grief that drives Serizawa’s col-
lection evokes earlier works of fiction
that explore how the effects of Japan’s
military campaign in Asia fanned out
across generations and borders, nota-
bly Chang- Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life
(1999), in which a retired Japanese
storekeeper in small- town America is
unable to overcome his guilt about a
wartime relationship with a comfort
woman in Japan, and Tan Twan Eng’s
The Garden of Evening Mists (2012),
whose Chinese- Malaysian judge strives
to process the death of her sister in a
Japanese concentration camp. Silence
suffuses both books, as the protago-
nists’ attempts to suppress their mem-
ories of war complicate their efforts to
look toward the future. In those novels,
the characters generally benefit from
the passing of several decades. Ayumi
and her brothers, however, are fight-
ing for survival during the tumultuous
years of the war and its immediate
aftermath, and the ongoing trauma
makes it difficult for them to artic-
ulate the conflicts they face. Their
struggles, and the struggles of the
families they raise, take up most of
Inheritors, which depicts how individ-
uals are shaped by social forces, like
patriotic support for the war, and end
up breaking—sometimes knowingly—
their own moral codes. Sadao spends
a lifetime picking apart his transition
from innocent civilian to willing war
participant:
But here lies the problem: the
issue of “transgression.” In peace-
time all lines are clearer; one need
only assemble one’s motives and
evidence for the courts to make
the determination. And even if
proceedings are flawed and ver-
dicts inconclusive, in one’s heart,
one likely knows if one has trans-
gressed. But in war? Does trans-
gression still require intent? Or
is it enough for circumstances to
conspire, setting up conditions
that pressure one to carry out acts
that are in line with, but not always
a direct result of, orders? I do not
know.Sadao’s story is composed of a de-
scription of his time in Manchuria,
where he never objects or voices un-
ease about what he sees, but never
openly supports Japan’s biological
warfare experiments either. He barely
speaks of his postwar life, and despite
four decades of reflection he is unable
to approach any sort of emotional reso-
lution. He calmly justifies the deaths of
“a few thousand enemies to save hun-
dreds of thousands of our own,” and
notes that his human subjects were fed
better than many soldiers, yet he suf-
fers from immense guilt.
Elsewhere, Masako, grappling with
the double trauma of losing her son
and working—both by choice and out
of necessity—in a brothel, debates the
nuances of female sexual enslavement
with a Korean- American journalist in
an interview that turns testy toward the
end:But I heard about a group of white
women—Dutch, or half Dutch,
I think they were, in Indonesia.
That country was under the Dutch,
wasn’t it? Before it was occupied
by our men?...
Those brave Korean women. To
come forward like that. All these
years later in front of the whole
world....
You sound just like my son: “re-
colonization.”...
No, no, I don’t mean to suggest
any were brothels—
But I’m not trying to “conflate”
my situation. Though one wonders
sometimes whether soldiers from
one country are so different from
another’s. Even now, wherever
there are foreign soldiers, even
peacekeepers.. .Your own troops
in Korea, Philippines—So much self- awareness, so little com-
fort. Throughout the book, the char-
acters display a remarkable capacity to
analyze not just their own responses to
the circumstances of war, but how their
situations fit within wider, often global,
conversations about power, domina-
tion, and race. Rarely do they reach
any sort of reconciliation. It’s almost
as if they were paying—making them-
selves pay—for consciously troubling
the calm surface of postwar Japanese
reticence about the war. Although
their predicaments are based in a Jap-
anese setting, they speak to much of
what happens elsewhere in contempo-
rary Asia, where even recent conflicts
are consigned to history. As Sadao
says:For why dig up graves from a ban-
ished past, selfishly subjecting all
those connected to us to what can
only amount to a masochistic pur-
suit? Isn’t it better to surrender to
a world populated by the young,
who, taught nothing, remain uncu-
rious, the war as distant as ancient
history, its dim heat kindling the
pages of textbooks and cinemas,
occasionally sparking old men
with old grudges, but nothing to do
with them?When I mentioned to my mother
during a Zoom call that I was writing
about a book on Japan and the war, she
let out a half- groan, half- laugh. “What
more is there to say?” she asked, a
shorthand dismissal of any attempt to
complicate the discussion of conflict
and trauma. My writer self felt duty
bound to protest, but another part of
me—more filial, more powerful—de-
cided to let it rest. It is a pattern of be-
havior that I’m accustomed to: I make
feeble attempts to tease the past from
my parents, but every time I come close
to uncovering pain, I am met with a si-
lence that also silences me.
My mother was born in 1942, toward
the end of the first year of the Japanese
occupation of what was then called Ma-
laya, in a small town on the edge of the
jungle in an area known to be a strong-
hold of the guerrilla resistance force,
drawn overwhelmingly from the coun-
try’s ethnic Chinese population. The
inhabitants of the town were presumed
to be anti- Japanese sympathizers who
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