Spanning decades and moving between post-war Japan, North Korea, and the American suburbs, Susan Choi’s Flashlight blends geopolitics with domestic literary fiction. A sudden disappearance forever changes the life of the Kang family. Serk Kang, earlier Seok, is a Korean immigrant living in post-war Japan. After suffering poverty and systemic discrimination for decades, Serk’s parents fall for propaganda and move to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, despite Serk’s pleas. Shortly after, Serk migrates to the US, where social alienation continues to follow him. There, he meets Anne, an American, whom he marries three years later. Anne, raised by her siblings, gave up her first child, Tobias, for adoption at the age of 19. The world has not been kind to both Anne or Serk. In their respective lives, they never fit in, and this convinces them that they may be a fit for each other. However, their marriage is troubled from the very beginning. Wrongly matched, they attempt to function as a family for the sake of their daughter, Louisa
Serk later moves his family to Japan, hoping to reunite with his parents, a motive he keeps secret from Anne and Louisa. Around this time, Anne begins to show early signs of multiple sclerosis, believed to be caused by the loneliness and alienation. She cannot speak Japanese and spends her days confined to their damp apartment.
Louisa is finally learning the ways of Japan when the Kang family suffers a life-altering event. In 1978, when Louisa is ten, Serk and Louisa take a walk on the jetty by the sea. Serk slips and falls. Louisa is later found grey and hypothermic. Serk is never found and is presumed dead. Anne and Louisa return to the US, their lives pulled in different directions, and decades pass before the devastating reality of what truly happened on the night of the disappearance slowly emerges.
Alternating between the viewpoints of Louisa, Anne, Serk, and occasionally Tobias, Choi brings into focus the secrets and misunderstandings that quietly demolish a family. Anne begins meeting Tobias weekly when he turns eighteen. Serk has secrets of his own. He maintains that he had no family before he met Anne, even as he regularly meets his sister in Japan. Louisa is caught between Anne and Serk, learning early how silence becomes a way of survival.
The symbol of the flashlight appears at the beginning, as Louisa recalls fragments from the night Serk disappeared. The flashlight reappears at different points in the narrative. It mirrors the novel’s structure: the reader sees only what the narrow beam allows. Choi reveals vivid details of a single day and then leaps across months and decades. Time speeds up and slows down. The reader is left to make sense of what remains unseen.
Flashlight is a story of family ties, anxieties, isolation, and lives fractured by geopolitical forces. Drawing strength from the unsaid and the unseen, the novel lingers long after it ends.