Susan Choi’s sixth novel takes a little-known and appalling aspect of Japanese-Korean history and fashions it into a rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure. Like the flashlight of its title it casts an evasive, variably illuminating beam, focusing on the hidden lives of characters, their careless and destructive lies, random yet weighted connections to each other, vulnerability and extraordinary ability to survive.
Choi’s previous work, Trust Exercise (2019) won the National Book Award in her native US. Of that novel, Choi has said that it “takes up the question of national identity, and the extent to which it coincides or does not coincide with ethnic and with cultural identity”.
Flashlight, which began as a New Yorker short story, has not dissimilar concerns as it takes in a sweep of places and periods from the 1950s to the early 2000s: suburban Indiana, downtown Los Angeles, the Japan of both city and shore, late 1980s Paris and London and, in its grave and beautiful conclusion, the border with North Korea.
It opens in the “dog days of August” 1977 in an unremarkable coastal town in Japan. On its beach one night, a nine-year-old girl is discovered suffering from hypothermia and half-drowned. Her father, with whom she had been taking an evening walk, has vanished.
Despite prolonged searches no trace of him is found, and the pair’s sandals remain side by side where they were placed at the end of the jetty. They become the objects of a temporary shrine of rice bowls, flowers, fruit and trinkets donated by local people, until they are washed away.
What is left following this catastrophe is a traumatised family — American mother Anne, and daughter, Louisa. The latter is angry, hitting out, eternally furious with her mother and, as time passes, barely remembering her father, Serk, who was presumed washed out to sea.
Of what happened that evening, despite a psychiatrist’s delving, she has no memory: that will come much later, when “her body is leaden as if she has swum all that distance again, through the muscling, relentless, gelatinous cold force of the waves”.
Serk’s alleged drowning remains in the background until two-thirds of the way through the novel as the sea — helped by a large dose of the fatalism that readers of fiction rely on — gives up its secrets. Before his disappearance, Serk is a lecturer in engineering who emigrated from Japan to the US on a visa, although as an ethnic Korean his Japanese citizenship had been cancelled in 1952.
Identity, names and statelessness — their arbitrary bestowing and removal — are central themes in this questioning novel. Serk is known variously throughout as Hiroshi (his Japanese name), Seok (Korean), and lastly, the Crab, by which time he has been almost subsumed into mythological status.
His parents, originally from Korea, were forced through poverty to move to Japan; several years after the second world war, which ended when Serk was six, they begin to make plans to return — to a now divided country, communist North Korea, the DRPK. By this time, Serk (the Americanisation of Seok) is about to graduate from college; his next sibling, a sister, Soonja, hastily marries to avoid leaving Japan.
Their parents, seduced by the promised paradise that awaits them and their three youngest children, make the journey “home”. After their return, their letters are scarce, stating only their great happiness, which sits oddly alongside urgent requests for basic food and clothing, for medicine and blankets. The letters gradually cease.
Choi’s narrative winds back and forth over some 50 years. The viewpoints of its principal characters alternate — from Louisa as a child, then a college student, then a married woman with children of her own; to Anne, her mother; to Serk, and to Tobias, Anne’s son by another man. Aged 19, she had been forced to give him up for adoption directly after giving birth. Anne’s and Serk’s marriage foundered from the start, blighted by his arrogance, silences and their bitter arguments.
By the time of Serk’s disappearance Louisa’s relationship with her parents resembles that of “a Venn diagram” with the child as the only common factor.
In the US her father is overprotective, to the point of obsessiveness. But when they relocate to Japan for what is meant to be his year-long secondment, Louisa is expected to be independent, like a Japanese child.
Having felt that she wasn’t white enough for the US, she is too tall for Japan, and initially she struggles. (Later, as a student travelling in France, she will be subject to a horrible instance of racist violation that prefigures the darker revelations that Choi has in store).
In Japan, Anne is the outsider, just as Serk always seemed in the US; confined to their damp flat with a mysterious wasting illness (eventually diagnosed as MS), while Serk takes Louisa on visits to meet a stranger, a woman from his past.
At this point Anne is reunited with Tobias, whose role in this complex familial structure — a spiky, snarly one that resists affection — is to be the savant, annoyingly compassionate older brother whom Louisa ridicules until she finally sees the point of him.
Culturally the late 1970s were a showcase for the blockbuster sci-fi film — on one of their last outings together Serk and Lousia attend a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is tempting to believe more in fantastical alien abduction than in the human shadow puppets of a totalitarian regime that, for Serk and others, will prove all too real as Choi delivers the book’s shocking last third: “Time is not a river moving ceaselessly into the future but a stagnated pool. Breathing at its surface, drowning in its depths, are the same.”
Here the personal graphically collides with the geopolitical. Yet it has been lying quietly in abeyance all along, like Louisa’s abandoned childhood backpack or Anne’s cassettes casually taped from Japanese radio. They are all clues hiding in plain sight in a restless, leisurely and capacious work of such emotional force and controlled style that it surely cannot be overlooked by this year’s Booker judges.
Flashlight by Susan Choi Jonathan Cape £20/Farrar, Straus and Giroux $30, 464 pages
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