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A review by ecruikshank
Inheritors by Asako Serizawa
5.0
An absolutely stunning book of staggering trauma. Set primarily in Japan and told as a collection of nonsequential short stories, Inheritors portrays five generations of a family and the reverberations of their devastating experiences during World War II. Purely on a sentence level, the writing is gorgeous. A lot of contemporary literature has almost a flat affect, but there is a poetry to Serizawa’s writing that is totally captivating, particularly in contrast to the brutality of the book. I found myself reading sentences repeatedly just to savor the language. She also shifts between styles and structures extremely smoothly.
The book is unrelenting in its exploration of themes of memory, forgetfulness, complicity in and deliberate ignorance of atrocities, nationalism, identity, and intergenerational trauma, and I so appreciated how Serizawa explores complex questions of morality without (for the most part) moralizing. No character or group escapes without critique, but the author has a great deal of empathy and compassion for her characters and portrays them with nuance. One chapter in particular (Train to Harbin) was excruciating for me to read, and I imagine different readers will find different chapters to be especially difficult. (This book contains just about every kind of trigger, so definitely do some research ahead of time if that is a concern.) One of the themes of the book is propaganda and nationalistic forgetting after a war; I saw that reflected in my own experience, as growing up I learned almost nothing about atrocities committed against and by Japan during and after the war, with the exception of the atomic bomb.
The book is so complex and thoughtfully constructed; I saw some reviews that suggested that the author should have arranged the stories chronologically, but I thought the organization was brilliant. I relied very heavily on the detailed family tree in the beginning, which I rarely do; in addition to providing the characters’ relationships, it also lists their dates of birth and death and the stories that feature them.
Unsurprisingly, some chapters are stronger than others. There was something very destabilizing about jumping around in time, even though that was intentional; some chapters seemed to do a better job of situating the reader, whereas others felt a bit more obtuse. One of the chapters toward the end was a bit didactic and plodding and felt like it was hitting me over the head a little with a summary of the themes of the book. And while I see what Serizawa was doing with the final two chapters (and the penultimate chapter had shades of Ted Chiang), I could have done without them.
That said, this was an extraordinary and challenging novel (a debut?!) and an obvious five stars for me.
The book is unrelenting in its exploration of themes of memory, forgetfulness, complicity in and deliberate ignorance of atrocities, nationalism, identity, and intergenerational trauma, and I so appreciated how Serizawa explores complex questions of morality without (for the most part) moralizing. No character or group escapes without critique, but the author has a great deal of empathy and compassion for her characters and portrays them with nuance. One chapter in particular (Train to Harbin) was excruciating for me to read, and I imagine different readers will find different chapters to be especially difficult. (This book contains just about every kind of trigger, so definitely do some research ahead of time if that is a concern.) One of the themes of the book is propaganda and nationalistic forgetting after a war; I saw that reflected in my own experience, as growing up I learned almost nothing about atrocities committed against and by Japan during and after the war, with the exception of the atomic bomb.
The book is so complex and thoughtfully constructed; I saw some reviews that suggested that the author should have arranged the stories chronologically, but I thought the organization was brilliant. I relied very heavily on the detailed family tree in the beginning, which I rarely do; in addition to providing the characters’ relationships, it also lists their dates of birth and death and the stories that feature them.
Unsurprisingly, some chapters are stronger than others. There was something very destabilizing about jumping around in time, even though that was intentional; some chapters seemed to do a better job of situating the reader, whereas others felt a bit more obtuse. One of the chapters toward the end was a bit didactic and plodding and felt like it was hitting me over the head a little with a summary of the themes of the book. And while I see what Serizawa was doing with the final two chapters (and the penultimate chapter had shades of Ted Chiang), I could have done without them.
That said, this was an extraordinary and challenging novel (a debut?!) and an obvious five stars for me.