Inheritors

Charting the story of one family over the course of 150 years, Inheritors is a dazzling multigenerational saga that grapples with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war. Written from myriad perspectives and in a wide range of styles, each of these interconnected stories illuminates and informs the others. 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 a fifty-year-old murder and 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. And several decades farther into the future, 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. Asako 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 breath-taking meditation on the relationship between history, memory, and storytelling, Inheritors is a triumph of imagination.