Inheritors

by Asako Serizawa

As for historical fiction, I feel that, as a genre, it often takes for granted the fundamental accessibility of history—as though history is an objective occurrence bound to a time and place, and it’s largely a matter of pinning down the details: what people wore, how the streets looked, the “facts” of what happened.

I hope this collection will complicate this idea and spark questions about how history is made, how it is lived, remembered, reproduced, and used, and how ultimately unbound it is by the time and place in which it is grounded. The Second World War didn’t start and end with specific people and events; its roots reach back to values seeded long ago, and its sundering effects have hardly lost their spark and propulsion.