11/2022 Inheritors, by Asako Serizawa

[Carol]

This is the thread for our November discussion of Inheritors, a collection of loosely related short stories written by Asako Serizawa. First published in 2020.

About the author, from Penguin RandomHouse: Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and grew up in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. A recent fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She currently lives in Boston. Inheritors is her first book.

Her website is here: https://www.asakoserizawa.com/

A brief 2020 NPR interview by Steve Inskeep with the author is here: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/890716...

A review from 2020 published in the Asian Review of Books is here: https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten...

I started listening to it on audio last week and plan to switch to a physical book. Who's planning to join the discussion? If you read it previously, feel free to share your impressions in this thread, as well.

[Bill]

I'll be starting it soon.

[Bill]

I'll bring up this sticky topic, since I'm the one who nominated Inheritors.

Serizawa was born in Japan, raised in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo, went to college in and lives in the US, and is writing in English.

So what is "Japanese Literature"? I've tended to define it to myself as something written in Japanese primarily for the Japanese market, and even people not born and raised in Japan can write Japanese Literature if they meet those conditions. Under those conditions, Inheritors qualifies as American Literature. But others would say it's a matter of the ethnicity of the author.

The classical Greeks considered someone Greek (Hellene, to be precise) if they had Greek ancestry, spoke Greek, and participated in Greek culture. This is the basis for our modern term ethnicity. Someone like me who has Irish ancestry but doesn't speak Irish (to be fair, a lot of Irish people don't speak Irish) and knows virtually nothing about current Irish culture doesn't quality as ethnically Irish. And I don't think American can be considered an ethnicity, because if there's one thing that defines America it's that we don't share an ancestry. If ethnicity is the only factor, surely Serizawa's fiction qualifies as Japanese Literature.

There are authors more borderline than Serizawa. Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel-prize winning British author who moved to Britain before he started school. Under the three conditions above, he doesn't particular qualify as ethnically Japanese, but some people continue to list his books as Japanese Literature (not me, for the record).

I welcome other people's thoughts on the topic.

[Carol]

I owned two copies of Inheritors when we voted for it, so I was interested enough - and sloppy in my GR inventory - to buy it twice - once in hardback, once in paper. I hadn't paid attention to the fact that it was written in English until later, and wondered how it got on our spreadsheet : )

I agree with your definition - published originally in Japanese primarily for the Japanese market. This group's interests have historically been exclusively focused on translated it, but I think has occasionally encompassed works by Western authors of Japanese heritage if that work - as here - is focused on the Japanese experience. It's all up to who nominates, who votes and what mood everyone is in, though, so it's maybe been more quirky than I'm recalling. In contrast, I don't think we'd include within "Japanese Lit" books by American Japanese authors focused on the experience of Japanese immigrants in contemporary Western nations divorced from a connection to Japan, itself, as here. I classify them as Asian-American or Asian-Brit Lit. I'm interested in hearing what everyone else thinks/does.

But then what do we think about Murakami Haruki who writes in Japanese but - if I recall correctly - with an eye toward the English translation that will inevitably occur, and may shape the way he expresses himself in Japanese to make it easier/faster for that English translation to occur? His works are inarguably Japanese Lit, but are they really primarily written for Japanese readers? or is the Japanese market really just the first stop on the lucrative global, English-reading market?

[Bill]

I don't know if Murakami is writing for the world market instead of the Japanese market, but I guess that happens to anyone who gets big enough. Once you know everything you write will be translated, you start to think about what the world wants from you. Murakami's books aren't just translated, either. He goes over what he wants added and removed from the English release, and sometimes it's a lot.

I've heard that about the anime/video game markets as well, that since 2005 or so they've had to consider the potential sales outside Japan and tweak their products to appeal to it. Manga less so because of how much of it is made by individuals or small groups rather than large studios (even though manga has to go through large publishers).

There's worse, too. I went to a talk in college by an ex-director for the (name might be slightly wrong) Beijing Film Institute who had emigrated to the US. It made art house movies like Raise the Red Lantern to meet Western expectations and never released them inside China.

[Carol]

Bill wrote: "I don't know if Murakami is writing for the world market instead of the Japanese market, but I guess that happens to anyone who gets big enough. Once you know everything you write will be translate..."

I'm still getting over the casting of Bullet Train and Goku in the 2017 DragonBallZ.

[G.G.]

Began Inheritors last night and loved the first story, "Flight."

In style and tone, I'm reminded of two books by Julie Otsuka: When the Emperor Was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic. As I'm sure everyone in this group knows, Otsuka is Japanese-American and thus her books would not normally be regarded as "Japanese literature." I agree with Bill's definition of Japanese literature as "published originally in Japanese primarily for the Japanese market."

Still, I'm always glad to read good writing by an author new to me; Katie Kitamura was another great discovery.

[Carol]

G.G. wrote: "Began Inheritors last night and loved the first story, "Flight."

I'm reminded of Katie Kitamura, actually, in terms of the elegance of many sentences, although Serizawa has a stronger sense of plot and characterization.

I’ve finished Allegiance in the third section and started Willow Run. Allegiance is the strongest of the three stories I read, or, more precisely, the one that best captured what I anticipated would be the approach to this theme if inherited experience. For my taste, these stories are maybe 25% longer than would be my preference, and they’re reminding me why I often resist short story collections, but it’s me not her.

[Matt]

I think it's a matter of culture: one reason I read foreign literature is to discover other cultures. Culture is a fairly abstract concept, of course, but language plays an important part in it. So I would consider someone of Japanese descent living in the USA and writing in English to be a part of US culture (and hence literature). But language isn't all of it, clearly, since everything written in English isn't part of English literature. This is why I'd class Ishiguro as a writer of English literature, and Murukami as a Japanese one - whoever your intended audience is, you will inevitably be a product of your own culture. As with Murukami, so once with Kōbō Abé - allegedly popular internationally because unJapanese - but arguments like this smack of orientalism, and I don't find them particularly convincing.

[G.G.]

Carol wrote: "G.G. wrote: "Began Inheritors last night and loved the first story, "Flight."

I'm reminded of Katie Kitamura, actually, in terms of the elegance of many sentences,..."

Read "Allegiance" last night and found myself agreeing with you, Carol, about length of at least this story--I felt that too much was explained, that the conclusion was too long. On to "Willow Run"!

[Carol]

G.G. wrote: "Carol wrote: "G.G. wrote: "Began Inheritors last night and loved the first story, "Flight."

I'm reminded of Katie Kitamura, actually, in terms of the elegance of m..."

I knew these were inter-related stories when I started, but I missed the connection between the initial 3 stories, so forgot about it. Then I started Willow Run, which is the story of the wife married to the narrator of Allegiance. On audio, where the narrator makes it 150% personal and breathtakingly difficult, difficult content. Trigger warning for (view spoiler)[sexual assault, throughout. (hide spoiler)]

Allegiance and Willow Run are the first stories I've read about the experience of the American occupation. They are worth the price of admission of this collection, without more.

[Bill]

@Carol

The hardcover has a genealogy chart in the front telling you how the characters are related and what stories they appear in. I keep referring back to it every time I read the next story.

[Carol]

Bill wrote: "@Carol

The hardcover has a genealogy chart in the front telling you how the characters are related and what stories they appear in. I keep referring back to it every time I read the next story."

geez - thank you, Bill. I don't know how I missed it, but I will blame it on mostly consuming by Audible thus far.

[G.G.]

Carol wrote: "Bill wrote: "@Carol

The hardcover has a genealogy chart in the front telling you how the characters are related and what stories they appear in. I keep referring back to it every time I read the n..."
Yes, the Kindle version has a genealogy too--but of course it's completely illegible and--unlike the main text of a Kindle book--cannot be expanded to legible size! Grrrrr.

[Alison]

I wonder whether someone could take a picture of the genealogy and post it? It's not like everyone here hasn't obtained a legit copy. (I'm team audiobook on this one—and let me tell you the read aloud of the genealogy was both tedious and superbly awkward.)

[Bill]

There's a Look Inside button on Amazon for the paperback edition, and it shows you the genealogy.

The last time I tried to put an Amazon link in a post here it got deleted, so I won't try that again.

[Alison]

Bill wrote: "I'll bring up this sticky topic, since I'm the one who nominated Inheritors.

Serizawa was born in Japan, raised in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo, went to college in and lives in the US, and is wri..."

I think a person of Japanese ancestry actively engaging in writing about Japan/Japanese-ness/Japanese culture handily qualifies as Japanese literature. Are we going to say literature written in Korean by Zainichi can't be "Japanese literature"? What about immigrants like Li Kotomi—a Taiwanese immigrant who writes in Japanese?

The more limited we make our definition, the more likely we are to leave someone out that deserves to be left in. Besides, return literature is a big deal. We can make it a subcategory, but it's still "Japanese".

As y'all have mentioned about Murakami, global markets are dramatically changing questions about "national literatures". I'd rather have a bigger tent than a smaller one.

(Thanks for nominating Inheritors, Bill. I wouldn't have picked it up on my own. I'm saying all the above as someone who needs to broaden my own reading.)

[Alison]

Bill wrote: "There's a Look Inside button on Amazon for the paperback edition, and it shows you the genealogy.

The last time I tried to put an Amazon link in a post here it got deleted, so I won't try that again."

Got it. I completely forgot you can't post images here. But I did take a screen shot and get a big image on my desk top, so that's something.

[Bill]

As more food for thought, rather than to be argumentative, I offer the following:

I don't think Japanese ancestry is sufficient. I think it takes some raised in Japan or sufficiently immersed in Japanese culture while living in Japan to write Japanese literature. Do you consider Kazuo Ishiguro to be writing Japanese literature? Also, would you consider a book written in English by someone whose parents were both born in Japan but who had never been there and never learned the language to be Japanese literature?

Literature written in Korean by Zainichi is a very good point. This is someone writing from inside Japanese culture. I would be wary of calling such 'Japanese literature' without asking the author first, though, because they might not want their work labeled as such. If they were fine with that, then I'd have no trouble calling it Japanese literature.

One of these days I'm going to pick up a book by Li Kotomi... so many books, so little time. If she's living permanently in Japan writing in Japanese, that meets the first definition I suggested.

[Carol]

I finished the book and wanted to hold back my thoughts until a few other members weighed in. It's the 30th, though, so here goes.

I was disappointed in this book. It had no arc, given its structure, although the author might have thought she'd created an arc by placing at its center the two most horrific WWII-timeframe stories - Willow Run and the one that addresses Japanese medical experimentation on Chinese prisoners. Two stories in a collection, though, is ineffective as a technique to drive the reader forward to the next story and the next.

The final story, so - the ending, so to speak - was awful. The writing was nails-on-a-chalkboard devoid of any charm or depth, much like a script of a tv show on Nick at Night. The concept that the fight to address climate change is this generation's "war", e.g., an equivalent to their grand- and great-grandparents' experience of WWII and the subsequent occupation might have worked, in another author's hands. Here, it was laughable and made me want to throw the book against a nearby wall. I recall having a similar thought with the initial couple of stories, that there simply wasn't any elegance to the writing or any complexity to the characters. But the ending was a clunker extraordinaire.

Serizawa's best work were the two most depressing, deeply disturbing stories. They are almost anti-Japanese literature in the way they linger over and focus on the specific cruelties they describe over and anon. None of the beauty of Japanese literature -- which predominately depends on a close reading to catch the critical events and feelings occurring between the lines, by implication only, and not by directly confronting the reader with every bit of ugliness -- is present. But Inheritors also is neither a collection of stories, each of which works as a standalone (most of them don't), nor a novel. Yes, the stories are connected we're told by the family relationships of each protagonist. As a literary product, though, its structure fails at its task and it's ultimately not at all successful.

I'd love to hear from other members who finished the book what they thought of it.

[Bill]

Sorry for not including examples. I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and have given it away already.

The best part of this book was the themes chosen for the stories. They're painful and necessary and include themes that other authors haven't addressed.

Unfortunately, the author seems to feel the themes are more important than the characters. Some of the stories (like Unit 731) are only about the theme and contain virtually no characterization at all.

I was hoping that the structure of stories involving an extended family and each centering on a different character would lead to multiple perspectives on the characters, like in say Life in the Dul-de-Sac . In that I was almost always disappointed.

I couldn't get through either of the last two 'future' stories. Both try to extrapolate technological/social trends a few years into the future, and as a mostly-ex-SF reader I have to say she did a poor job of it.

[Carol]

Bill wrote: "Sorry for not including examples. I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and have given it away already.

The best part of this book was the themes chosen for the stories. They're painful and n..."

All of your observations resonate with me. I'm glad I wasn't alone in not being wowed. The ratings are so high that I almost feel like I read a different book than the average reviewer.

[G.G.]

Carol wrote: "I finished the book and wanted to hold back my thoughts until a few other members weighed in. It's the 30th, though, so here goes.

I was disappointed in this book. It had no arc, given its structu..."

I agree with much in your account of Inheritors Carol: there are some powerful stories, but--as you put it so well--"None of the beauty of Japanese literature -- which predominately depends on a close reading to catch the critical events and feelings occurring between the lines, by implication only, and not by directly confronting the reader with every bit of ugliness -- is present."

The impact of the stories is effected almost entirely via their subject matter: "Willow Run" is "true" to the period, one might even think of it as in dialogue with Fumiko Hayashi's story "Bones"--and yet I found it impossible to believe that the wife of a leftwing activist would sacrifice herself in quite this way; as characters, both she and her husband are incoherent.

I get that the author, having grown up abroad, didn't know about the wartime experiences of her family, and that when she did find out what they had survived she was appalled. And yet her choice of fiction to explore the Japanese experience of immigration and war struck me as a reach for profundity and meaning that the stories themselves mostly could not support.

[Carol]

G.G. wrote: "Carol wrote: "I finished the book and wanted to hold back my thoughts until a few other members weighed in. It's the 30th, though, so here goes.

I was disappointed in this book. It had no arc, giv..."

Well said on all points.

In particular, I couldn't identify what was bothering me about the couple in Willow Run and Bones, and you've nailed it. The horror and tragedy was an overwhelming distraction from the fact that the protagonists don't make sense as characters.