K-LIT REVIEW Susan Choi’s family saga ‘Flashlight’ illuminates historical horrors
A copy of "Flashlight" by Susan Choi / Courtesy of Faye Leung
When a book starts with a mysterious disappearance into the sea, you can bet good money that the cause is more complicated than “he slipped and fell.” Precisely how complicated, how bleak and shattering the truth is, however, no reader of "Flashlight" could have prepared for.
The sixth and longest of National Book Award winner Susan Choi’s novels, "Flashlight" was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The multigenerational family saga flows from the 1940s to the 2000s and moves from Japan to the U.S. to South Korea.
The story opens with the incomprehensible disappearance of Serk Kang, father of protagonist Louisa, when she is 9 years old. One pitch-black night in Japan, father and daughter are walking and chatting on the breakwater of a quiet beach. A flashlight falls. Her father’s tense grip crushes her small fingers. This tumble of hazy snatches is all Louisa remembers when she wakes in the crisp sheets of a hospital bed to the news that her father is missing, presumed drowned.
Leaving readers on this cliffhanger, the story zig-zags through time, first fast-forwarding to the frigid aftermath of a family’s reduction from three to two, then snapping back into the past. The Kangs are a deeply unhappy family for whom resentment both tears at its seams and glues it vindictively back together in a perpetual cycle of misery.
Meandering through time, the book threads through the stories of Serk, the Zainichi Korean who seeks recognition for his sharp intellect in the U.S., knowing he’d always be disadvantaged in the country he was born in; Anne, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed American woman Serk marries knowing nothing about the child she secretly gave up long before they met; and Louisa, the brilliant but arrogant child who worships her father and inherits his scorn for her mother.
In an interview with the Center for Fiction, Choi admitted that “Flashlight” draws on her own experiences struggling with identity as the only child born to East Asian and Jewish parents in her neighborhood in Indiana.
When the Kangs move to Japan for Serk's work, Louisa nurses a nervous anticipation that, maybe for once, her “un-American” dark eyes and hair would be symbols of her belonging rather than signs of her difference. Choi, ahead of her own childhood trip to Japan, had also wondered if this was where she’d finally meet people who looked like her.
As both Choi and Louisa were disappointed to find, they didn't look remotely like the Japanese people they saw in Japan. Louisa’s height and toothy American smile only seemed to alienate her further from her smaller-framed and mild-mannered peers. Unanswerable questions of identity and the fruitless pursuit of belonging, both in the wider world and within the family, are thematic pillars of the novel that are revisited over and over again with resigned tenacity.
From the first page to the last, “Flashlight” is blanketed by a gray heaviness that is the product of Choi’s penchant for descriptions of ordinary scenes with spillover emotions from her imperfect and unlikable characters. Darkness suffused with frustration and confusion “slid itself onto [Louisa’s] chest like a snake, organizing its weight into neatly stacked coils that might go on forever and bury her, crush her.” As her health deteriorates, Anne’s lethargy permeates the room where “the collective effort of an army of tabletop fans could not muster a breeze. No, no, no, no, the fans shook their heads, while they traded the stagnated air.”
The irregular flow of time is a noteworthy aspect of the saga, which spans decades. At times, it slows to focus with acute attention on the minutest of daily tasks, counting every step, wobble and jolt of Anne’s struggle on crutches during a grocery run. Other times, it sweeps past life-changing events such as marriages, divorces and the bearing of children like a high-speed train past the scenery. Wielding time like a chisel, Choi carefully sculpts the contours of her characters by being generous with moments that reflect their inner worlds, and while being unforgivingly miserly everywhere else.
In a flex of narrative muscle, just when the book seems to take shape around a character-driven family saga steeped in grief, the story takes a jaw-dropping turn. The truth behind Serk’s disappearance slams into readers sideways more than halfway through the book, abruptly snapping the tracks of the Kangs’ personal misfortune onto the rails of a true historical tragedy so horrifying that its existence at first defies belief, then whips diplomatic tensions in East Asia to near-breaking point.
The undertaking of putting faces to an unspeakable cruelty in real life is treated with somber meticulousness. To do history justice, Choi mobilized her skills as a former fact-checker for the New Yorker, poring over firsthand accounts by real-world survivors, official records and other historical documentation. The seriousness with which she approached her task is evident not only in the list of references she includes at the end of the novel, but also in the chilling details in the final stretch.
"Flashlight" is available through dbbooks.co.kr.
Faye Leung runs @the_bibliocracy, an Instagram account dedicated to singling out reads for savoring. She regularly posts book reviews and recommendations, and has a particular fondness for Korean literature.