Interwoven Stories

Sometimes you read a book you just have to tell people about. That was the case for our high school librarian, Tracie Landry, when it came to Inheritors by alumna Asako Serizawa ’92. A unique work of fiction somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories, “it has been my favorite book of the year,” Tracie raves, eagerly sharing with us about how she couldn’t put the book down. Ruth Harimoto ’77 (AP ’03–11) who works in the Health Center agrees. “The book was so intriguing that I couldn’t put it down. After finishing, I started at the beginning and read it again!” she gushes. “I have been recommending it to friends and family over and over again. It is a must read.” And not only did it receive praise from the ASIJ community, it also garnered critical acclaim from the likes of The New York Times, NPR Book Review and more. Ethan Chatagnier of The Kenyon Review calls Inheritors “powerful” and “intelligent,” deeming it “a book that deserves to become a crucial pillar in the literature of war.”

Part of what makes Inheritors such an interesting read is its unique method of storytelling. “When I learned about World War II in high school, everything was limited to this very linear sort of narrative,” Asako says of her inspiration to write the book. “There were no personal stories of those who lived through the war and the occupation. It made me want to know, what were those people’s actual experiences?” And so Inheritors focuses on just that, utilizing various narrators over the course of more than a century through non-sequential short stories that slowly illustrate a larger narrative about Japan and Japanese Americans through World War II to the near future, with its latest story set in 2035.  “Historical fiction often shines a light on the experiences of a single narrator and a specific set of events, but the events in Inheritors’ interwoven stories emerge as light from a prism bent differently by each narrator’s life experiences,” Tracie expresses. “The overall result is both intimate and epic.” 

The focus on different experiences of the characters—those who were raised in Japan, those who immigrated to the United States, those who were born in the US but struggle with their Japanese identity—spoke so strongly to members of the ASIJ community for a reason. Having grown up in three different countries before settling in Boston, Asako strongly relates with the struggle for finding one’s own identity as a third culture kid and the lack of sense of belonging in any country. Born in Japan, Asako’s family moved overseas when she was just one year old, heading to Singapore for her father’s job with a construction company. They were there for a decade before moving to Jakarta for another five years, and then back to Tokyo when Asako was in the middle of 10th grade. 

“It was hard, I have to say,” Asako comments. “When I left a school for the first time in the middle of middle school to go to Jakarta, I was actually ready to make a change. I really wanted to move and have a fresh slate to be a new person. But moving in the middle of high school was pretty hard, because I had a core group of friends at that point.” While moving in middle school had felt like a chance to develop a new identity, moving away from the familiarity of her support group and making new friends in Tokyo proved challenging. 

“It comes up in various ways, this idea of not belonging,” Asako shares. “The cultural aspect is probably the hardest, because I speak both English and Japanese fine, but there are cultural gaps because I didn’t grow up in either the States or Japan. I don’t have the cultural references. TV, music, radio… those are such a crucial part of forming bonds and building community with others, and if you’re missing that part, sometimes, it’s hard to make small talk or connect with others.”

But there were upsides, as well. “When I got to ASIJ, I found that some friends from Singapore ended up being there as well,” Asako reminisces fondly. “I saw them, and was like, wait, who’s this familiar face? So on the other hand, that sort of thing can happen, which is fantastic.” Connections (and missed connections) are another central theme of Inheritors, another aspect which has roots in Asako’s own experience.

But perhaps the largest impact on Asako’s inspiration for Inheritors was the way she came to understand Japanese history through the course of her education. “Because I grew up in Southeast Asia, there was obviously a lot of Japanese influence in that area, particularly those countries that were occupied during World War II. But I didn’t really know much about the history, partly because the education at that time was so Eurocentric,” Asako shares. She enjoyed the available aspects of Japanese culture during her time in Singapore and Indonesia, but it wasn’t until she came to ASIJ that she really gained a full understanding of how that culture had made its way to those countries. “It’s really when I came back to Japan and took the Japan Seminar course at ASIJ that I got to see history from that perspective,” she reflects. “Japan and Asia were suddenly in the front and center in class, and all of a sudden, I got a better sense of Japan and its context in the world.” 

It was Japan Seminar that really got Asako thinking about the historical events that would become the basis for Inheritors. “It opened me up to thinking about Japan’s role in the world in a way that I hadn’t previously,” she reflects. “It’s interesting because in Japan, the Pacific side of the war is so prominent; it’s such a touchstone. There’s all this talk around it. And yet, my grandparents who lived through the war and my parents who lived through the occupation never told me their personal stories. They would talk about the war in general, you know, ‘war is bad’ and all of those things, but they never really elaborated. And so that silence became really curious to me.” The more Asako thought about the lack of personal narratives about World War II from those close to her, the more she realized what an important issue it was to her, both personally and in a greater societal context. She never got a real answer as to her grandparents’ experiences with the war, which made her feel all the more like the dearth of narratives from various perspectives of those who experienced the war firsthand was a gap that needed filling. “I think coming to Japan and realizing that there were very particular narratives about the war, but that it was so one sided and very limited to a very deliberate, particular narrative was an important point for me,” she shares. “So much of the material in English was western-centric, or America-centric. All that sort of combined to make me think, this war was so influential—it’s so much a part of the structure of our society and it still stands between so many people. It changed history. And yet there’s so little about it from certain perspectives.” 

It was an issue that continued to stick with Asako long after she left ASIJ, through college, part of a PhD program in literature, and a switch to an MFA in creative writing. “I didn’t think I was going to pursue writing fiction as a serious thing,” she admits, looking back on that time. “My background is in the academic side of literature, but I got really burnt out. So for a few years after I finished my master’s, I didn’t write.” But it continued to bother her that the experiences of so many people like her grandparents never made it to mainstream modern audiences, and eventually, she felt that there must be something she could do about it. “And that’s how I came up with the project for this book,” she shares, “which is also when all the aspects of my education sort of came together. I could use my academic background as well as my creative interest to figure out a way to center the human experience while maintaining a sort of critical tension.” It was a unique approach, but Asako felt that her background made her the right person for the task, from her well-rounded study of literature and writing to her passion about the content. “All of those things came together in Inheritors as a work of fiction.”

But once she got started, completing such a long and complex work wasn’t an easy task. In fact, it took over 12 years from the starting point to publication, including all of the required research before she even began to write. “Part of the reason it took me so long was that I did a novel’s worth of research for each of the thirteen stories that make up the book, and then I spent so much time typing to puzzle it together,” she says. And it wasn’t just that the research was time-consuming—some of it was literally impossible at the time that Asako first began to work on the project. “There’s a lot of history, a lot of material that wasn’t available to me at first. And then as things became declassified and the internet expanded, it allowed me to access new information. So then as that came in, I had to kind of revise things and rethink things.”