42 The New York Review
supplying food, medicine, and other
necessities to the fighters hiding in the
forest.
In school we learned the com-
mon, gruesome facts of the Japanese
counter insurgency strategy, which in-
volved strictly controlling rural com-
munities in order to sever the link
between the guerrilla fighters and their
support base. A frisson ran through
my classmates and me at mentions
of interrogation and torture, but our
schoolboy imaginations were mostly
untroubled by personal links to those
acts of violence. In the near- total ab-
sence of family accounts of life in these
towns during the occupation, we felt
sufficiently divorced from the war to
dryly view it as history instead of a set
of events that shaped us and our com-
munities. It was much later, when I was
an adult and wondering why my grand-
father had suffered from ill health all
his life, that I was told—only once,
and in passing—that he had been tor-
tured during the occupation. At that
time, I didn’t know how to ask any
questions.
The desire for clarity across gener-
ations is what drives all of the stories
in Inheritors. Parents can’t understand
why their children zealously sign up
for the war effort; children struggle to
imagine why their parents abandoned
them; Americans and Japanese strive
to interpret their respective coun-
tries’ seemingly senseless actions. As
Luna and her ancestors try to piece
together the various fragments of their
family histories, the gaps in knowledge
often necessitate lengthy interrogations
during chance encounters. Arriving in
Japan after her father’s death, Luna
begins to sort through his belong-
ings. He had chosen, mysteriously and
abruptly, to move to Japan and leave
Luna and her family when she was a
small child, a devastating rupture that
left her permanently confused about
her identity. Now she discovers that
she knows next to nothing about his.
She meets Watanabe, one of Masaa-
ki’s former colleagues, and Yagi, who
runs a boarding house in Tokyo where
Masaaki once spent time, and who ap-
pears at the family home with news of
Luna’s father and her long- lost uncle,
Miyagi:“So he was in Tokyo all this time?”
Luna asks. “I didn’t even know my
grandparents ever lived there.”
“As far as I know, Miyagi- san
was born in Tokyo,” Yagi says.
“After the war, there was no way
for him to prove his identity, so he
took odd jobs, mostly day labor,
and helped my father around the
shelter. He was involved in those
peace protests too, but he was
vague about his activities. He was
always secretive.”
“How did they find each other?”
Luna asks, trying to absorb the
details.
“Miyagi- san volunteers at a
nonprofit called Sanynjkai, an or-
ganization that helps the home-
less. A couple of years ago, he
got very sick and started talking
about finding his parents’ grave.
Most people ended up in common
graves after the firebombing, so I
don’t know what he expected, but
with Sanynjkai’s help, he eventually
found your father.”
“And they had no clue about
each other.”Luna consistently explains her views
on the war with brevity, which in-
vites similarly brief responses that fail
to reveal the nuances of such a vast
subject:“Of course, we’ve hung onto our
version of the narrative too, in
America: World War Two was
our last ‘unambiguous’ war. It still
gives us leverage. It’s easy for us to
tell others to move on, get along,
not drag around old issues.”
“It’s not so different here, thanks
to our economy,” Watanabe says.
“In very different ways, I think
for countries like yours and mine,
the issue is that war has become a
metaphor. There are real wars, real
costs to wars, but they’ve largely
been outsourced, and daily life is
peaceful.”The problem is that what is “unambig-
uous” often turns out to be confused.
For my mother and those of her gener-
ation, the response to Japan’s involve-
ment in the war is unequivocal: she
remains anti- Japanese. For a while
my mother refused to buy Japanese
goods, then in the 1980s, at the start
of a period of anti- Western decol-
onization in Malaysia, when Japan
became the “model” Asian coun-
try, she joined the local ikebana club
and took Japanese lessons for several
years (the only foreign language she
ever learned). She admired Japan for
its economic success and rich culture
yet continued to harbor a deep resent-
ment against it.While Serizawa’s older characters,
with their inability to process trauma,
suggest the difficulty of scrutinizing
historical grief, the younger ones place
themselves under enormous pressure
not just to decipher their incomplete
understandings of the past, but to an-
ticipate its consequences. Luna’s son
Erin, born in 2010, is building a com-
puter program in the year 2035 that
models the Earth’s fluctuating weather
conditions and their impact on agricul-
ture, resources, new habitats—in short,
human survival. His story, whose title
borrows the name of his virtual planet
(“The Garden, aka Theorem for the
Survival of the Species”), describes
unstable global societies in the near
future, set in motion by 150 years of
war, migration, and humankind’s fail-
ure to resolve the conflicts that mar its
history:Close to the end of the 2020s, it
was clear where the world was
headed. Cemented by the long-
ago wars of the 1930s and ’40s, the
United States still had leverage,
with its vast market and military
umbrella, but along with the Rus-
sians and Chinese, it was now just
one of three empires competing
with varying degrees of subtlety to
divide up the world, indenturing
the poor and incentivizing coun-
tries rich in resources but stingy
with cooperation.Erin is focused solely on the pres-
ent, with little introspection or appre-
ciation for the histories that formed
him—nowhere in the brief glimpses we
get of his family, for example, does he
connect with his mother or her back-
ground. Japan is barely mentioned,
and we are left to assume that Luna
withholds from Erin the same burdens
of the past that her parents withheld
from her—that she encourages him to
think only about the future. The vir-
tual planet he creates feels very much
like the one we live in today, rather
than a radical reimagining of the fu-
ture. As an exercise in genre fiction,
Erin’s story is an enjoyable contrast
to the grim suffering elsewhere in
the collection, but as speculative fic-
tion, it fails to convince us of what
life might look like in the decades to
come.
The strongest stories in Inheritors
are those that surrender to the un-
known and the unknowable and fail to
make the facile connections expected
of much contemporary fiction, with
its emphasis on a pleasing arc culmi-
nating in a satisfying resolution. “Pa-
vilion,” perhaps the most arresting, is
also the most stylistically incongruous:
a sort of Borgesian story in which two
men discuss a Borges story. Seiji, the
son of Masaharu and Masako, lost in
the bombings as a teenager, now finds
himself miraculously reunited with
his parents’ adopted son, Masaaki. On
a quest to find out about his parents’
later years, Seiji manages to discover
Masaaki’s address and turns up at his
door.
We are never told exactly how the
trail of information leads Seiji to Ma-
saaki or exactly how they feel about
this fortuitous meeting, because they
quickly fall into a conversation about
a work of fiction they both, coinciden-
tally, admire. In an extended passage
they pore over the intricacies of Bor-
ges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,”
about a Chinese professor spying for
the Germans in Britain during World
War I. Evading capture by a British
agent, he ends up in a deep and laby-
rinthine conversation with an eminent
Sinologist about the nature of chance,
choice, and time.
Seiji and Masaaki have spent most
of their lives ignorant of each other’s
existence. Through this strange, for-
mal conversation—which amounts to
an admission that they cannot decode
this almost unfathomable story—they
are finally able to achieve a sort of
intimacy. What they share is not the
artificial closeness that extravagant rev-
elations might have been expected to
bring—what kind of relief would they
have been able to enjoy anyway, after a
lifetime of loss?—but an honesty about
their foreignness to each other, their
estrangement from their own personal
histories. QAsako Serizawa, 2020MatthewModicaAvailable from booksellers or nyrb.comA classic biography of
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