asako serizawa
Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and spent her pre-college life in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. She completed her BA in English and French at Tufts University, her MA in English and American literature at Brown University, and her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College.
Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, and Witness. In addition to support from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Troedsson Villa Residency in Nikko, Japan, her work has received a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Pushcart Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes.
A recent Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a recipient of a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, she is currently finishing a collection of interconnected stories revolving around the legacies of the Second World War, which will be published by Doubleday, along with a novel, in 2020.
She lives in Boston with the writer Matthew Modica.
INHERITORS: STORIES (2020)
Serizawa follows a winding maze through a Japanese family’s history in her dynamic debut collection. A family tree beginning with Masayuki (born in 1868) and continuing through to Mai (born in 2013) creates the work’s backbone, as Serizawa constructs a nonlinear narrative filled with abrupt turns, accidental betrayals, and supposed curses and myths. The opening story, “Flight” (covering 1911–1981), follows Masayuki’s daughter, Ayumi, as she loses some of her memories while others become more vivid. In the collection’s standout, “Train to Harbin,” Ayumi’s doctor brother contemplates his youthful nationalism in the years just after WWII and his role in the wartime occupation of China. In “Luna,” set in 1986, Ayumi’s Japanese-American grand-niece Luna learns her father, Masaaki, was adopted and is of Korean heritage (not Japanese, as he believed), leading her to recall her earliest memories of visiting Japan. In “Passing,” set in 2010, Luna returns to Japan to collect Masaaki’s possessions and ruminates not on “where he belonged” but “how he wanted to fit in.” The final two stories, “The Garden” and “Echolocation,” jump into the future to investigate the fallacies of perception and what cyber warfare might look like after Mai’s brother, Erin, develops a global VR climate simulator for predicting disaster. By showing Japan as both colonizer and colonized, Serizawa delivers an elegant, stimulating web of stories.
“Inheritors reveals an author of fierce intellect looking at war legacies from this angle and that, working her way into their nuances. By deconstructing the toolkit of the novel, Serizawa dodges the inevitability of a war narrative to offer a wistful hope or a melodramatic tragedy. Instead, she creates a more powerful form in which she can align the pieces to magnify each other like the lenses of a telescope. This powerful, intelligent book stands in the company of William T. Vollman and W.G. Sebald and their investigations of life during wartime or in the long shadow after. But the tone, the structure, and the territory are all Serizawa’s, in a book that deserves to become a crucial pillar in the literature of war.” — Kenyon Review
“In this stunning debut, O. Henry Prize–winning author Serizawa tells the stories of one Japanese family, spanning five generations during and after WWII. With beautiful lyrical prose, Serizawa presents a powerful and heartbreaking look into the ways war, colonization, and loss affect not only the survivors, but the generations that inherit these stories.” — Emily Park, Booklist
“These stories by Asako Serizawa are tremendous, intimate, startling and essential; they show us how the past is so often the most powerful force in what we idly call the present.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors
“An extraordinary book—beautifully crafted, emotionally resonant and profoundly moving. Asako Serizawa imbues her characters with so much depth and generosity that I felt as if I were reading about people I already knew and loved. An intensely powerful book by a writer with endless talent.”
—Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
“This splendid story collection is a sword through the heart. Asako Serizawa depicts with rare acuity and nuance several generations of one far-flung family as it’s buffeted by the forces of war, migration, displacement, and that ultimate crucible, time. There are no easy answers or clean resolutions in Serizawa’s stories, but what you will find is the genuine stuff of human experience, rendered with precision and honesty. Inheritors is debut fiction delivered with the verve of a master.”
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“I was struck again and again not only by the remarkable scope and multiplicity of Inheritors but by the voices Serizawa inhabits—each is so distinct and yet wonderfully intimate. A book to be savored, slowly, overflowing with lifeblood and endurance.”
—Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others
“[A] dynamic debut…By showing Japan as both colonizer and colonized, Serizawa delivers an elegant, stimulating web of stories.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Here is the sagacity of Serizawa's book — her enchantment draws us into a channel of experiences and voices seemingly connected only by the consequences of their tragedies — war, betrayal, rape, murder, abandonment.” — NPR Review