Phantoms of Self and Other

A review and interview with Christian Kiefer

American troops supervise the movement of Japanese Americans from their homes on the American west coast to 10 specially built camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour during World War II. | Credit: Hulton Deutsch (Getty)

“To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts.”

— Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

Our country’s current social crises are the result of a widespread, trans-partisan refusal to recognize ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves. “Selfhood” is given in our encounter with the other. For anyone who cherishes their own distinctiveness, their own autonomy, this entails a debt to those different from ourselves. One of the chief joys — and the unsettling challenge — of great fiction is that it deepens our awareness of this reality.

By this measure, Christian Kiefer’s new novel Phantoms succeeds magnificently. Not only does it deepen one’s sense of duty to the other, its narrative framing actually models the work of self-reflection necessary to fulfill that duty.

Phantoms opens on Ray Takahashi’s return to his family’s home after fighting in the Second World War. He knows his parents and siblings no longer live there, that they were never allowed to return to that small house on the edge of an orchard…