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Flashlight: What Happens When Darkness Gets a Name · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: September 2025. Six novels were left on the Booker shortlist.
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  Speaker 1: One of them follows a man who walks out onto
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  Speaker 1: a stone breakwater in Japan with his 10-year-old daughter, carrying
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  Speaker 1: a flashlight it isn't yet dark enough to need, and
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  Speaker 1: never walks back. The judges praised its layers. They praised
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  Speaker 1: its surprises. Over the next year, three more juries put
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  Speaker 1: the same book on their final lists, and it lost
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  Speaker 1: every time. The book is Flashlight by Susan Choi, and
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  Speaker 1: I understand why four juries wanted it. Most of that
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  Speaker 1: praise is earned. But the thing the judges singled out,
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  Speaker 1: the surprise, is the part of this novel I think
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  Speaker 1: is wrong, and what it costs the book almost never
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  Speaker 1: comes up. Somewhere past the middle, Flashlight tells you who
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  Speaker 1: turned out the light, so the question worth carrying through
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  Speaker 1: this episode is easy to say and hard to settle.
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  Speaker 1: What does the novel gain by finally naming its darkness,
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  Speaker 1: and what does it lose of everything it already knew
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  Speaker 1: without a name? Choi was about 10 herself when her
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  Speaker 1: family spent six months in Japan in the late 1970s.
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  Speaker 1: She has said the memories stayed with her as something
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  Speaker 1: eerie and beautiful, even though nothing eerie happened. Decades later,
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  Speaker 1: she learned that in those same years, people had been
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  Speaker 1: disappearing from the Japanese coast, a young girl among them.
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  Speaker 1: She wanted one novel to hold both, her quiet private
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  Speaker 1: memory and that public horror. And for years, she couldn't
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  Speaker 1: make them fit. So she found a way around the problem.
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  Speaker 1: She wrote a short story set after the catastrophe that
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  Speaker 1: never says what the catastrophe was. And that story became
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  Speaker 1: the book's prologue. In it, a girl named Louisa sits
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  Speaker 1: across from a school psychologist back in America. Her father
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  Speaker 1: is gone, presumed. drowned she is sharp and openly contemptuous
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  Speaker 1: of kindness and before the sessions are over she has
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  Speaker 1: stolen the psychologist flashlight at night she points it at
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  Speaker 1: her bedroom ceiling that is nearly all that happens it
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  Speaker 1: is still the best summary of the book you will
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  Speaker 1: get because everyone in this family is holding a small
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  Speaker 1: beam and a very large dark and calling whatever it
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  Speaker 1: lands on the truth Then Choi goes back to the
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  Speaker 1: night itself. Summer, 1978, a seaside town on the west
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  Speaker 1: coast of Japan. Luisa's mother, Anne, stays indoors, already unwell.
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  Speaker 1: Luisa and her father, Cirque, walk the breakwater at dusk,
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  Speaker 1: the way they always do. He cannot swim. He brings
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  Speaker 1: the flashlight anyway, long before he could need it, and
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  Speaker 1: that one habit tells you most of what you need
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  Speaker 1: to know about him. On the walk, he scolds her
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  Speaker 1: about how she treats her mother and asks her to
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  Speaker 1: start acting grateful now instead of someday. Those are the
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  Speaker 1: last words he ever says to her. Before morning, Louisa
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  Speaker 1: is found on the sand, soaked and barely alive, with
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  Speaker 1: no memory of the hours in between. Cirque is never found.
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  Speaker 1: From there, the novel turns and goes looking for him
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  Speaker 1: in the past. Cirque was born Seok, to Korean parents
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  Speaker 1: who had come to Japan for work. and at school
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  Speaker 1: he answered to Hiroshi so that nobody would ask. He
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  Speaker 1: learned what he was all at once, when the war
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  Speaker 1: ended and the streets filled with people cheering a free Korea.
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  Speaker 1: Then the peninsula split, and some years later a campaign
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  Speaker 1: started calling the Koreans of Japan home to the North.
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  Speaker 1: More than 90,000 went, drawn by promises of housing and work.
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  Speaker 1: Sirk's parents believed the promises, When they showed him a
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  Speaker 1: flyer with a photograph of tall apartment blocks, he told them,
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  Speaker 1: as gently as he could, that a picture of one
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  Speaker 1: building proves only that one building exists. They went north.
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  Speaker 1: He went the other way, to graduate school in America,
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  Speaker 1: and took a name Americans could pronounce. Ann is the
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  Speaker 1: American he marries, and Choi gives her a past as
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  Speaker 1: sealed as his. At 19, she had a son by
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  Speaker 1: an older man and signed the boy over to him
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  Speaker 1: and his wife. And every Christmas, a short update arrives
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  Speaker 1: about the child she isn't raising. She meets Cirque through
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  Speaker 1: a job transcribing an eccentric professor's work. They trade their
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  Speaker 1: histories with a kind of cool regret, and Choi sums
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  Speaker 1: up the logic of the match in one dry sentence.
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  Speaker 1: The world had never suited either of them, which seemed
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  Speaker 1: to prove they suited each other. It is a marriage
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  Speaker 1: founded on two people agreeing not to look too closely.
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  Speaker 1: Then the secrets start to move. Anne lets her lost
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  Speaker 1: son back into her life without asking Cirque. Cirque takes
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  Speaker 1: a year in Japan without telling Anne what he really
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  Speaker 1: wants from it, which is some way to reach the
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  Speaker 1: family that went north. In Japan, Luisa picks up the
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  Speaker 1: language in months. Anne, whose body is beginning to fail
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  Speaker 1: in ways no doctor has named, picks up almost nothing
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  Speaker 1: and stays inside the apartment. By the night of the walk,
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  Speaker 1: the three of them are already half-lost to each other.
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  Speaker 1: What comes after the disappearance is the stretch readers complain about,
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  Speaker 1: and to me, it is the real achievement of the book.
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  Speaker 1: Anne and Louisa go back to America. Louisa grows up
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  Speaker 1: cruel to her mother in the exact way children are
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  Speaker 1: cruel to a parent who embarrasses them and leaves for
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  Speaker 1: college as far away as she can manage. The son
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  Speaker 1: Anne gave away turns up again and ends up kinder
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  Speaker 1: to Louisa than almost anyone. Anne's illness takes her legs
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  Speaker 1: and then most of her independence. Then comes the long
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  Speaker 1: section that reviewer after reviewer wished Choi had cut. Anne
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  Speaker 1: alone in a small apartment where a single errand can
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  Speaker 1: take the whole day. A neighbor about 50 yards away
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  Speaker 1: who once served in Korea. Basketball on television. followed with
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  Speaker 1: an intensity she can't quite account for. Choi has said
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  Speaker 1: she cut those pages again and again and could never
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  Speaker 1: get them down to the bone because they weren't about events.
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  Speaker 1: They were about the texture of one narrowed mind, and
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  Speaker 1: she has said the character borrows from years of watching
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  Speaker 1: her own mother live with multiple sclerosis. Those are the
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  Speaker 1: pages where Flashlight is most alive. A woman who lost
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  Speaker 1: her husband to the sea and her daughter to resentment
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  Speaker 1: builds a life out of a short walk and a
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  Speaker 1: ball game, and the novel stays beside her without asking
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  Speaker 1: her to stand for anything larger. It is the one
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  Speaker 1: stretch of the book where nobody is holding a flashlight,
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  Speaker 1: and for once, you can see the whole room. So,
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  Speaker 1: take stock of what the book has done so far.
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  Speaker 1: Choi has built a family that loses each other with
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  Speaker 1: no outside help at all, through pride and silence. What
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  Speaker 1: she hasn't explained yet is the beach. She could have
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  Speaker 1: left the beach unexplained. It would have been the braver book.
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  Speaker 1: She doesn't. Far from Louisa, in China, a South Korean
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  Speaker 1: activist who has spent his life tracking people stolen across
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  Speaker 1: borders takes in a wrecked old man. The man walked
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  Speaker 1: out of North Korea with nothing but the clothes he
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  Speaker 1: was wearing. He curses in fluent English. Some days he
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  Speaker 1: lectures a class that isn't there. Some nights he panics
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  Speaker 1: and insists he has to get home because Louisa has
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  Speaker 1: school tomorrow. The old man is Cirque. On the breakwater
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  Speaker 1: in 1978, North Korean agents took him. His captors told
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  Speaker 1: him they had his daughter too, and for years he
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  Speaker 1: cooperated to keep her alive. When he stopped cooperating, they
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  Speaker 1: sent him to a camp. None of this is fantasy.
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  Speaker 1: In 2002, North Korea admitted to Japan that it had
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  Speaker 1: abducted 13 Japanese citizens in the late 70s and early 80s.
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  Speaker 1: Five came home. The regime declared the other eight dead,
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  Speaker 1: and families in Japan and South Korea are still waiting
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  Speaker 1: on names that were never on any list. I believe
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  Speaker 1: all of it is history, and Choi did serious work
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  Speaker 1: to earn it. She read the testimonies of people who escaped,
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  Speaker 1: knowing how many of them had been doubted and decided
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  Speaker 1: that the shape of what they described was true, even
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  Speaker 1: where the details were contested. What I can't accept is
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  Speaker 1: what the reveal does to the novel around it. For
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  Speaker 1: 200 pages, the darkness in this family had no author.
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  Speaker 1: Cirque's coldness and Louisa's cruelty came from the people themselves,
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  Speaker 1: from what they hid and what they refused to ask.
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  Speaker 1: Once the regime walks in, the darkness has a flag
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  Speaker 1: and a chain of command. The father, who seemed to
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  Speaker 1: have half left his family, turns out to have been
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  Speaker 1: stolen from it, and every failure before the beach starts
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  Speaker 1: to read like a prelude to a crime. A critic
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  Speaker 1: at the New York Times noticed something close to this,
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  Speaker 1: that by the end, the history crowds out the story
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  Speaker 1: until the book reads like a briefing. I'd put it
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  Speaker 1: more sharply, the history doesn't crowd the family out, it
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  Speaker 1: excuses them. Set flashlight beside Pachinko, Minjin Lee's novel about
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  Speaker 1: the same community, Koreans living in Japan across generations, and
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  Speaker 1: the choice becomes visible. Lee never needs an abduction. Her
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  Speaker 1: catastrophes arrive slowly, through registration papers and a name on
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  Speaker 1: a school roll. She trusts that being Korean in Japan
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  Speaker 1: is already a story with enough danger in it. Choi
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  Speaker 1: had that story on the page, and a boy who
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  Speaker 1: answered to Hiroshi and reached past it for something louder.
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  Speaker 1: The frustrating part is that Choi held the better version
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  Speaker 1: in her hands. Cirque went to Japan with a private
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  Speaker 1: hope of reaching the family that went north. Whatever took
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  Speaker 1: him off that breakwater, he had spent a year leaning
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  Speaker 1: toward it. That is the version where the family's darkness
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  Speaker 1: and the state's darkness touch and nobody gets an alibi.
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  Speaker 1: The novel raises it and then the thriller machinery buries
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  Speaker 1: it under logistics. Choi has said she never knew how
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  Speaker 1: to join her private memory to that public horror. I'm
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  Speaker 1: not sure the join was possible. I only know where
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  Speaker 1: it grinds. And yet at the very end, The book
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  Speaker 1: finds its way back. The son Anne gave away is
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  Speaker 1: the one who learns of an advocacy group for the
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  Speaker 1: abducted and the one who brings Louisa the news. Louisa,
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  Speaker 1: middle-aged now, flies to Seoul. The father she finds there
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  Speaker 1: knows her on some days and on others takes her
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  Speaker 1: for someone else. Choi has spoken about her own father
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  Speaker 1: late in his life when he often mistook her for
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  Speaker 1: other people and you can feel that knowledge in these pages.
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  Speaker 1: They're the least geopolitical pages in the second half of
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  Speaker 1: the book, and the strongest. On one of those visits,
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  Speaker 1: the old man thanks Anne, and he thanks her for
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  Speaker 1: something small. Years earlier, she had insisted that Louisa take
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  Speaker 1: swimming lessons. Cirque was the parent who couldn't swim, the
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  Speaker 1: one who carried the flashlight. Louisa came out of that
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  Speaker 1: water because of the mother who stayed inside. Decades earlier,
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  Speaker 1: his last words on the breakwater asked her to act
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  Speaker 1: grateful to her mother, and the novel spends 400 pages
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  Speaker 1: letting her refuse. Then it hands the gratitude back to him,
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  Speaker 1: a frail man in a hospital in Seoul who can
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  Speaker 1: barely hold on to her name. If this pace works
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  Speaker 1: for you, one book at a time, read slowly, and
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  Speaker 1: argued with, follow the book brief project. The next one
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  Speaker 1: is already open on the desk. Those swimming lessons are
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  Speaker 1: the book's verdict on itself, whether Choy meant it or not.
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  Speaker 1: The regime explains how Cirque vanished. It explains nothing about
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  Speaker 1: why Louisa lived. For that, the novel has to return
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  Speaker 1: to the mother in the narrowed apartment, the one everyone
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  Speaker 1: in the story found easy to dismiss, the story included.
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  Speaker 1: I think the twist is the weakest decision in a
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  Speaker 1: very strong book, and I think the book knows it.
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  Speaker 1: because its last real revelation has nothing to do with Pyongyang.
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  Speaker 1: Four juries praised the surprise. What lasts is older and
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  Speaker 1: quieter than that. He carried the light, and she taught
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  Speaker 1: the girl to swim.