What happened on that Japanese beach?

Susan Choi manages the extraordinary in her 2025 novel Flashlight. In 450 pages she creates four fully rounded characters and evokes their lives in the US, Japan, France, and North Korea over a fifty-year period. And she does it without losing the reader's interest in their lives and the events that batter them.

When Flashlight begins Louisa is a nine-year-old American child living with her parents, Ann and Serk, in a small city on the west coast of Japan in what sounds like the late 1950s. She goes to a Japanese school, has picked up the language, and loves to swim.

Ann was—and in some ways remains—a free spirit. In her teens, she traveled in the Middle East with a boy she married long enough to have a son at age 19 and get divorced. The ex demands—and gets—all rights to Tobias who Ann does not see again until he is 19. In her mid-20s Ann marries Serk and has Louisa.

Serk is ethnically Korean. His family was brought to Japan before WWII where he grew up. (Korea was a Japanese colony until 1945.) An exceptional student, Serk added English to his Japanese and Korean languages. After the Korean War, North Korea invited Koreans living in Japan to return to the peninsula where the Communist government had established a socialist paradise. Serk's family, with the exception of a married sister accept the offer, but he is dubious. However, because of Japanese prejudice, Serk does accept a US Government offer to study in the States where he obtains a green card, a doctorate in mechanical engineering, and a university professorship.

Tobias, like his mother Ann, is a free spirit, accumulating languages and experiences. When we meet him, he is living in a Buddhist temple, paying his way by doing odd jobs for the monks.

Serk, Ann, and Louisa are in Japan for a year because Serk had to replace another professor at a sister Japanese university. One evening Serk disappears and Louisa is found almost drowned on the beach and Flashlight takes a totally unexpected—but historically accurate—turn. To say more would, I believe, spoil your pleasure.

I am in awe of Choi's ability to create character and to have them dance through decades without missing a beat or losing the reader. I thought I was finished with fat books. I was mistaken.