interview<\/a> with the Booker Prize foundation, Choi said that \u201cFlashlight\u201d emerged from memories of her own childhood, as well as stories she remembers hearing at the time.<\/p>\n\u201cIt was a combination of being haunted by childhood memories of a trip to Japan \u2014 that was not catastrophic but was still very disruptive \u2014 and by stories about the unexplained disappearances, in the late 1970s, of ordinary Japanese people, including a schoolgirl not much older than me.\u201d <\/p>\n
Writing the novel now, she added, was a brilliant stroke of timing and survival for her and her readers.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs for telling the story now \u2014 it wasn\u2019t that I chose this moment, so much as that I finally managed to finish the book. But I feel lucky, in that this moment does turn out to be a very receptive one for a story about ordinary people facing extraordinary, often malevolent forces.\u201d <\/p>\n
Those forces, in \u201cFlashlight,\u201d aren\u2019t otherworldly \u2014 they\u2019re from the alien within. Choi transforms the novel\u2019s namesake into a motif and method: The beam of a flashlight fans out, and only in that sliver of light is knowledge illuminated, just as memory only encapsulates fractions of lives. Like a tractor beam from Louisa\u2019s much-feared \u201cClose Encounters of the Third Kind,\u201d the light our narrators are armed with isolates one piece of many and draws up the question of what remains unseen: a father\u2019s disappearance, an unnamed disease and families harboring more mystery than memory. The beam catches on a silhouette before shifting away, and Choi asks us to hold that space between illumination and shadow.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nIn \u201cFlashlight,\u201d Choi\u2019s shifting perspectives don\u2019t simply diversify the narrative, they fracture it. Each chapter reframes the last, widening the emotional distance between characters rather than closing it. Louisa and Serk agree that Anne is inattentive while Anne quietly believes herself to be a \u201cplaymate mother,\u201d doing her best within the confines of illness and outside the knowledge of motherhood. Serk praises his daughter\u2019s academic promise even as Anne only sees a child slipping away from her. Through these layered perceptions, every character becomes unreliable \u2014 not because they deceive, but because they see incompletely. Their truths overlap like beams of light in fog: illuminating in fragments, never in full. In this way, \u201cFlashlight\u201d mimics the dissonance of real life, where our understanding of others is always partial, always refracted through our own grief and memory. Choi\u2019s prose reminds us that empathy begins in the unknown, in the willingness to sit with what we cannot fully see.<\/p>\n
\u201cFlashlight\u201d explores a range of themes \u2014 including immigration, familial complexity and grief \u2014 but its most compelling thread emerges through a narrative centered on chronic illness. Louisa\u2019s mother, Anne, is afflicted by a severe chronic illness causing a near total loss of her mobility, which only worsens after the family moves to Japan. The narrative investigates the significance of chronic illness for the one experiencing it, but also the hardship and resentment it inflicts upon their family members. With consistent medical negligence and no proper diagnosis, her illness is inherently psychosomatic to others. Blame is placed upon her by family members, loved ones and, most harrowingly, herself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Immigration in \u201cFlashlight\u201d becomes its own filter, all characters forced to live in spaces between cultures, only seeing fragments of each. Serk, Korean by heritage but born in Japan, is an immigrant everywhere he goes: between nations, between languages, between selves. Anne\u2019s time in Japan casts her as an outsider in both body and tongue, isolated not just by culture but by circumstance. Even after returning to America, her wheelchair becomes its own kind of border, separating her from the world she thought she knew. Louisa inherits this displacement in a different register. In Japan, she is too American; in America, too Korean. No matter how fluently she learns the steps \u2014 language, manners and literal choreography \u2014 she remains unsynchronized.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFlashlight\u201d wants us to know that we are shaped, irrevocably, by the forces we cannot see. The gaps are forcibly wedged open between all \u2014 father, daughter and wife \u2014 bound by love and distanced by a constant, quiet unknowing. Gaps of kinship between every emigration and subsequent exile, ultimately elucidating the vastness between belonging and orbiting \u2014 these liminal spaces form the restricted scope in which an identity can grow: Louisa\u2019s confounding lack of a father, Anne\u2019s all-consuming illness and every character embodying the immigrant. As the book begins jumping forward in time, the reader feels this acutely \u2014 we are being intentionally left out, meant to grope around in the dark to learn what we missed in the time between. In \u201cFlashlight,\u201d absence is not void \u2014 it is architecture. Choi invites us into the architecture of the invisible, and while the light does not touch everything, it reveals where we must live within.<\/p>\n
The characters throughout the narrative are startlingly real, their pain tangible and their relationships achingly familiar. Choi writes with precision and empathy, flickering between characters and generations to demonstrate how imperfect perception shapes our lives. Every memory in the novel wobbles like a beam through fog, revealing and obscuring truth in equal parts. Migration, too, becomes an act of partial sight: To leave one home and enter another is to live between understandings, to translate the self again and again. Each of Choi\u2019s characters is, in their own way, an immigrant. Together, they inhabit the novel\u2019s central truth: the feeling of forever standing at the edge of understanding, never quite inside the light.<\/p>\n