Bio:
ASAKO SERIZAWA was born in Japan and grew up in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. A graduate of Tufts University, Brown University, and Emerson College, she has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A former fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, INHERITORS is her first book.
Synopsis:
Spanning more than a century, and revolving around the Pacific side of World War II, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations of a Japanese family grappling with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war. Written in myriad styles and set across Asia and the United States, each of the characters’ stories adds to the others to illuminate the complex ways in which we experience, interpret, and pass on our tangled history.
A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother’s wife answers a call for first-person testimonies, gradually revealing the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. A half century later, her estranged granddaughter, raised in America, retraces her roots across the Pacific, chasing the secrets behind her father’s absence. Decades later, two siblings confront the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war as the world, mutated by new technology, is threatened by a violence more pervasive than the one that scorched the earth a century earlier.
Serizawa’s characters walk the line between the devastating realities of war and the banal needs
of everyday life as they struggle to reconcile their experiences with the changing world. A breathtaking meditation on the relationship among history, memory, and storytelling, Inheritors is a triumph of imagination and stands in the company of works by Lisa Ko, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Min Jin Lee.
