From the 1970s through the 1980s, North Korean agents abducted several Japanese citizens who had accidentally stumbled upon their activities in Japan. The case of 13-year-old Megumi Yokota, kidnapped in 1977, is especially infamous. While the North Korean government acknowledged a handful of such kidnappings, the actual figure may run into hundreds.
“Unexplained disappearances” like that of Yokota’s and disturbing “childhood memories of a trip to Japan” inspired Flashlight, Susan Choi’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Initially written as a short story
From the 1970s through the 1980s, North Korean agents abducted several Japanese citizens who had accidentally stumbled upon their activities in Japan. The case of 13-year-old Megumi Yokota, kidnapped in 1977, is especially infamous. While the North Korean government acknowledged a handful of such kidnappings, the actual figure may run into hundreds.
“Unexplained disappearances” like that of Yokota’s and disturbing “childhood memories of a trip to Japan” inspired Flashlight, Susan Choi’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Initially written as a short story that was published in the New Yorker in 2020, the novel grew out of an exploration of the crippling feeling of never knowing the fate of someone you have lost.
“Disappearance demands explanation,” notes Saho — the woman whom one of the characters, Tobias, talks to at a meeting of families of the disappeared towards the end of the novel.
But back to the beginning: “One thing I will always be grateful to your mother for — she taught you to swim,” begins the short story. In the novel, the line is placed in the second paragraph; the first informs readers about 10-year-old Louisa and her father, armed with a flashlight, “making their way down the breakwater, each careful step on the heaved granite blocks one step farther from shore.”
Louisa’s mother, Anne, is confined to a wheelchair. On hearing her father, Serk Kang, reluctantly praise her mother, Louisa submits angrily, “I hate swimming.” This is not true but Serk knows it is his girl’s way of telling him that she’s loyal to him, and not her mother. Choi renders the fraught mother-daughter relationship masterfully, weaving in questions of identity even as she seeds a suspicion of familial and national memory. Sample the child Louisa’s interiorities presented in the third-person: “No one was ever listening closely — even the people who especially claimed to be listening were not really listening.” The insight recalls Joan Didion’s comment in an interview about Blue Nights, her memoir on losing her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne: “I mean, we’ve been listening to the very edge of what [children] say without letting it sink in.”
As a college student, Louisa “hated her mother… because the thought of her caused so much pain.” She blames her for losing everyone she ever loved — even a cat she couldn’t take care of. But towards the end, readers notice something striking about how Louisa’s relationship with her mother evolves: “She couldn’t remember any previous time Anne had ended a call; it was usually Louisa who had to go first.”
Like the end, the novel’s beginning too is eerie. Right away, it is clear that the family will be struck by grief: Someday, you’ll feel thankful to your mother. But I want you to act thankful now. These were Serk’s last words to Louisa, or so the latter remembers. This signalling of the slipperiness of memory and the unreliability of the narrator is not new. What is marvellous is how it is sustained throughout the novel.
When Louisa marries for the second time, her husband George takes her to Hawaii. Reaching there, she can’t help but tell herself that “this was likely not a true memory of Hawaii but borrowed from later in life.” Like her mother, whom she accused of making things up, faking her illness, perhaps Louisa, too, is dreaming of something that may have never happened. A line that appears elsewhere in the novel – “In dreams, there is sometimes the knowledge of knowledge, without the knowledge itself” – adds to the scene.
Midway through, Serk’s sabbatical takes him to Japan. His parents were from Jeju Island and learning, as a child, that the place wasn’t Japanese but Korean was “so profoundly disorienting that the greater discovery, that he himself was Korean, was for the moment secondary.” While nation-states and international bodies indulge in the charade of mapping territories, what happens to the minds, hearts and souls of those who experience a sense of internal displacement? It is this that Choi draws out beautifully through the experiences of the Kang family in the first half.
Anne, who had her first child, Tobias, at 19, is brilliantly constructed. With the child in his father Adrian’s custody after their separation, she worked as a typist for a “confirmed bachelor” Dr Louis Grassi, who needed a “female comrade”.
It is at Dr Grassi’s place that she meets Serk. “The world had not been fit for either of them; this suggested they were fit for each other.” In Serk’s “expression” and “his force of personality”, she felt a reflection of someone “identically regal, and grim, as if awaiting a correction of substandard conditions.” They were meant to be apart together, for they both were hiding from each other certain aspects of their lives. Their distinct pasts were a wound they carried everywhere; they lived invisibly, as if intergenerational traumas could so easily be kept hidden.
Another fascinating character, Tobias, becomes a mendicant wanderer after having his tumour surgically removed. He happens to listen to Saho speak at a gathering of the families of disappeared people: “It was such a beautiful day. How could she have known what was coming? Remember, she had just been at tennis-team practice. She was 13 years old. She was walking home, from her own school, down her own street, in her own town.”
Just as Tobias meets the group by chance, the “Koreanness” of Anne’s name draws a much younger man named Walt to her doorstep. As new characters are introduced one after another, Flashlight assumes the pace of a thriller. All sorts of questions arise in the minds of the reader: In trying to understand the mysterious disappearances, would Tobias be able to piece together his own scattered family? Will Louisa ever be able to respect her half-brother, who insists on referring to Anne as ‘Our Mother’? Will Anne ever be able to understand a man for who he is, and also who she truly is?
A taut historical fiction, Flashlight is an invitation into understanding, a search to measure the depths of humanity, and a quiet protest against the humiliations of the identity politics of nation states.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
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