Flashlight by Susan Choi — a haunting tale of memory, loss, and the shadows of history

Unpacking trauma

Flashlight opens on an especially traumatic event. A young girl and her father go for a sunset walk on a beach in Japan. Hours later, the daughter wakes up on the shore, soaked and freezing. It is dark and her father is nowhere to be seen. His disappearance is so complete that, even days later, there is no body to be found. In the story that Choi spins out of this incident, loss and grief echo across generations of a family that finds itself tossed about by the waves of history.

These reverberations come to us from the perspective of the three central characters — Seok, a Korean-origin academic in a US university who is sent on a secondment to Japan, where he is joined by his American wife Anne and their daughter Louisa. A fourth important character is Anne’s son Tobias — the result of a youthful, ill-conceived affair with a married man — whose hippie lifestyle and open heart are what lead to the revelation that hurtles the novel towards its resolution.

Undergirding this story is the question of how the unseen forces of geopolitics can rupture families and ruin lives. All, but especially Seok — an ethnic Korean born in wartime Japan who is rendered stateless after the hostilities end — are victims of a game in which they are too small, too insignificant to even be considered as pawns.

The connection of Seok’s story to a largely forgotten tragedy of a particularly brutal century is well-woven, even if it feels a little rushed towards the end when decades are collapsed into each other to get to the denouement.

Choi has said in interviews that she wrote this book after years of being haunted by the stories of unexplained disappearances she encountered on a long-ago trip to Japan; the research born out of her fixation is evident here, even if the expository tone the book takes on in its final third is a tad disconcerting after the meditative, dilatory approach of the first two-thirds.

Flashlight by Susan Choi is shortlisted for the 2025 Booker.

Beyond the statistics

Despite this, the story never ceases to move, because Choi refuses to lose sight of the big tragedies of small lives: The loss of a spouse or parent, the grief of being unmoored from the familiar and the destabilising effect of realising that you may never fully know those you’re bound to by blood.

Choi serves up slivers of the big picture — brief illuminations from the flashlight of the title, with everything else still in darkness. But that is how memory works — it’s the only way it can keep us from being paralysed by all we know and perceive.

Funes’s superhuman ability to remember every single detail of every single thing his eyes perceive so burdens him with the full picture that he is never able to really “see” it. For Serk, Anne and Louisa — for the rest of us — progressing through life by just looking at what shows up in the beam of a flashlight is the only way to survive.