How do you live with history?

Ordinarily I do not care for a book that has to include a family tree to guide the reader through the family connections. 

I am making an exception of Asako Serizawa’s collection of thirteen linked stories, Inheritors. The stories involve five generations of a Japanese family. They cover the period 1913-2035 although do not appear in strict chronological order. The family tree is useful to see how characters are related and the year in which a story takes place.

Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and spent her pre-college life in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. She completed her BA in English and French at Tufts University, her MA in English and American literature at Brown University, and her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College.

She told the Rona Jaffee Foundation in connection with the book, “Over the years, the task of balancing my practical responsibilities with my writing needs trimmed my life to its essentials, but my project, over ten years in the making—an interconnected short story collection spanning 150 years and tracing five generations of a family fractured across Asia and the U.S. by war—was slow going, its completion, as well as my sense of its viability, blinking in and out of focus. Then, several years ago, I received a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where I made tangible progress, after which pressing on felt critical.”

Serizawa’s winning a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award made possible not only a whole year of full-time writing but also the freedom to return to Japan for final research. The result is Inheritors, an exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. 

A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his work at Unit 731, where the Imperial Japanese Army experimented on human subjects.

The doctor’s sister-in-law, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the realities of life in Occupied Japan. 

Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. 

Decades in the future, two siblings face the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war. 

We live through the fire-bombing of Tokyo in which more people died than in the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima (and thankfully, given Serizawa’s fierce writing, we do not have to live through that). We ride with a pilot as he guides his kaiten, a manned suicide torpedo, toward an American destroyer. 

Because Serizawa is writing from both an American and Japanese perspective, the stories are exceptionally rich with insight and the details are fascinating and apt. The storis are told from both a first-person and a third-person point of view. They can come in the form of a Q&A interview and as a transcript, as in: 

“I was born in the first year of Taisho—

“That’s right, 1912. Of course, as a Japanese, I wonder if nuances aren’t lost when accounting in the Western way. For example, unlike Meiji people, like our parents, we Taisho people were very open to the Western world. Have you heard of ‘moga,’ or ‘modan gaaru’? As a girl, I thought we were quite modern, quite the sophisticates <laugh>. . . .”

A central character in one story becomes peripheral in another, and the book’s power grows as we learn more about this family, their lives and histories. And Serizawa is not afraid to break free of the strict realism that characterizes most of the stories. The penultimate story, “The Garden, aka Theorem for the Survival of the Species,” while still realistic is set in 2035 and begins:

“’So, the world’s deconstructing,’ Erin said. It was day three of their senior year of high school. He and Anja were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. ‘War’s breaking out on all planes of existence. We’re like, the last human generation still holding out any chance of survival. What do we need to do?’”

Reading Inheritors would be a good start.