by Susan Choi, 2025
I’m starting to listen my way through the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist. The first one I’ve listened to is Flashlight by Susan Choi, a remarkable and complex story that spans decades and traces three fractured families through postwar Korea, Japan, and America.
I say remarkable because I don’t think I’ve ever read a story where at one point I asked myself, Where on earth is she going with this? only to be amazed to find all the dots miraculously connected, all the pieces fitting, all the characters having a purpose after all. And I say complex because the amount of research this author had to do, to bring in Korean history (both North and South), Japanese history, and our own American history into the mix…well, I am astounded and jealously impressed.
The main characters are Louisa, Anne, and Seok (or Serk, depending on the transliteration). Louisa is the mixed-race child of her American mother Anne and Korean father Serk. There is also Tobias, a child that unmarried Anne had early in life and gave up for adoption, who resurfaces much later and brings not only chaos but reconciliation.
Seok (later Serk) was born into a Korean family but raised in Japan. Very confusing for the child, he was given a Japanese name so he could assimilate and attend Japanese school. He spoke Japanese all day long at school and answered to the name Hiroshi. But when he was at home, his parents spoke Korean, and one day he was told, “Hiroshi isn’t your real name. Your real name is Seok, and we aren’t Japanese, we are Korean.” As you can imagine for a boy in grade school, this was about as disorienting as it comes.
Seok’s parents become lured in by the North Korean propaganda of abundant housing, jobs, food and clothing, and so relocate there after the war. This causes an estrangement between him and his family. As a young adult he emigrates to America, meets Anne, and they marry and have Louisa. The story is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of these three characters, which are vastly different because of their backgrounds. The name Hiroshi is dropped permanently and Seok becomes Serk, apparently because no one in the US can pronounce it properly.
Serk tells Anne he is alone in the world—that he has no family whatsoever. He wishes to walk away from his past and assimilate thoroughly into the US. He becomes a professor at a university in the northeast and is quite successful in keeping up this deception for many years.
Until his university asks him to take a one-year working sabbatical in Japan, which he finds he cannot refuse. After all, he speaks fluent English and Japanese.
While in Japan, Louisa and her father take a walk along the breakwater at the beach one evening. They do not return home, sending a now-wheelchair-bound Anne into a panic. When the authorities arrive at the beach to initiate a search, they find an almost-dead Louisa on the beach but are able to revive her. Serk, who cannot swim, is never found and is presumed drowned. This event so devastates their little family that they return to the US, shattered, and try to rebuild their lives. Anne and Louisa cannot recover from this shock and their relationship suffers mightily. A few years later when Louisa is old enough to enter college, she moves as far away from Anne as possible.
Never assume you know where this story is going. After the drowning incident, there remain five more parts to the book. We are thrust into the historical record between North and South Korea and Japan, and I learned so much that I never knew. What really happened to Serk? The author offers an intriguing possibility.
But I do have one criticism. Choi expects her readers to make huge leaps through time. One minute Louisa is a college student, dating someone named Roman. In the next “Louisa” chapter, the two are married and have a child. In the next one, they are divorced and she’s already remarried to someone else. I’m thinking, What?? A few steps were skipped there, don’t you think? It’s the same with all the characters. These kinds of abrupt shifts gave me a bit of whiplash.
Yet I listened to hours of excruciating and unnecessary detail—for example, on the cumbersome efforts it took Anne to get from her wheelchair and into and out of her car. (We never are told precisely what her medical condition is, and are left to guess.) Or, this one: “…the young man…stepped through the flash of daylight made by the briefly opened door while Serk was still shifting his weight from his buttocks to his knees in preparation for standing.” Several hours of audio could have been cut (there are 17 in total) by some judicious editing.
But overall, I’m amazed at Choi’s superb imagination and ability to tie this story together and not lose track of her characters, the complex history involved, and even how she ended the book. I highly recommend you invest your time in this one. You can purchase Flashlight here.
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