Review of Flashlight by Susan Choi
When your family straddle nations, where do you belong?
Story
Serk, a bright Korean boy born in 1940s Japan, is eager to emigrate to the US to study after most of his family are persuaded to move to North Korea. But he feels like an outsider everywhere. Years later he persuades his American wife, Anne, to bring their daughter, Louisa, to Japan for a sabbatical post. The family struggle to adapt to a Japanese society with one foot in the past and take a fateful break at the coast. Following a sunset walk by the sea, Serk disappears and Louisa is nearly drowned.
Assuming Serk has drowned, Anne returns to the US with Louisa and her life falls apart. As a young adult, Louisa feels lost, while her half-brother Tobias, now living in Japan, collects scraps of information about unexplained disappearances of Japanese nationals. Louisa is not convinced that Serk is dead.
Setting
Flashlight focusses on the fraught post-war relationship between Japan, North and South Korea, and China, and the human implications of families caught between the estranged regimes. The novel is at its most intense in the scenes in postwar and 1970s Japan, and in the hidden world of North Korea’s prisons and re-education camps. The chapters featuring family life in America make less of an impression – possibly because they are more familiar.
Characters
Serk is a complex character: independent, cerebral yet prone to irrational temper, partly explained by losing his own family to DPRK’s propaganda and never feeling accepted by Japan or the USA. He is fiercely protective of Louisa as a child, and his determination to find her during their long separation is heart-wrenching.
I found Anne less sympathetic, and verging on unpleasant, although she has her own trauma after giving up Tobias for adoption and then losing her husband and her health. Louisa is awkward and strong willed as a child and as an adult. But her bond to her father runs deep and is only resolved in the final chapter.
My opinion
Flashlight is a weighty novel with multiple narrators, and long chapters that span decades. I persevered due to my interest in the awkward post-war transition of Japan from an imperial, peasant society to a modern economic power, and the frosty relations between the East Asian nations.
The sections set in North Korea were challenging yet compulsive, as Serk’s tenacity to both survive and find Louisa sustained him through inconceivable hardship. Flashlight also made me reflect on how hard it is to know who to trust when nation states can impose such cruelty and twist people’s behaviour against their human instincts. The story is, horrifically, rooted in real incidents that are not widely known.
Whilst some of the US-based sections from Anne’s POV dragged for me, I warmed to both Serk and Louisa as the story developed, and the final act in North Korea and China was astounding enough to keep me up late.
Flashlight was shortlisted for the booker prize and the womens prize
Author website: https://susanchoi.com/
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