A family tree at the beginning of the book, along with the epigraph from Theodor Adorno ('Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant'), offers one roadmap for navigating the text.

Not a traditional collection of disparate short stories, the 13 pieces in INHERITORS converse and combine to illustrate how the events of World War II in the Pacific shaped the fate of a single Japanese family across multiple generations in Japan and the United States. I don't blame my young Monkey-self for that simplistic worldview, but rather the schools, textbooks, and teachers - indeed the very way that history was taught in America, where the US was seen as a historic force of unimpeachable good and Japan was seen as a land of cherry blossoms, samurai, and ramen.Īsako Serizawa’s thought-provoking, daring, and altogether remarkable debut collection of interconnected stories challenges these received ideas, stereotypes, and misunderstood or little known aspects of a war that engulfed the entire Asia-Pacific region for nearly a decade and led to 36 million deaths. It was only when I read John Hersey's Hiroshima as a high school student that it dawned on me the bombs actually landed on people. As a student, I pictured the brave scientists working feverishly in their secret labs during the Manhattan Project I pictured the Enola Gay flying over the Pacific on its spiritual mission I pictured the mushroom cloud rising into the sky. When it came to the Pacific side of World War II, we learned almost nothing beyond Pearl Harbor, kamikaze pilots, possibly Iwo Jima. Growing up a young Monkey in the United States, history - and especially World War II - was presented in black and white.

Threadneedle novel