Louisa is the second of the novel’s main protagonists. She is the daughter of Serk and Anna Kang. Her character arc revolves around her struggles to recover the truth about Serk’s disappearance and to reckon with her relationship to her mother, Anne. In childhood, Louisa asserts that Serk was abducted, but cannot supply the details or evidence required to substantiate her claim to the adults around her; her memory gaps play into the novel’s interest in The Limits of Human Memory. The consequent assumption that Serk died affects the way Louisa grieves and how she navigates her complicated relationships with her parents.

Louisa’s precocity makes her conscious of her parents’ attempts to deceive her. In Chapter 2, Louisa immediately senses that Anne has lied to her about the nature of her connection to Tobias. The lie threatens Anne’s life with Serk, so Louisa chooses to protect family stability by keeping Tobias’s existence a secret. In Chapter 7, Louisa discerns that Mrs. Ishida is more than Serk’s friend, approaching this secret conspiratorially by asking if Serk would prefer Mrs. Ishida as his wife. The different dynamics with each parent suggest that Louisa takes after Serk.

As a child, Louisa antagonizes Anne, resenting the outsider status she inherited from her white mother and angry about feeling pity for Anne’s degenerative multiple sclerosis. Louisa’s resulting assertion that Anne is faking her illness mirrors Anne’s disbelief in Louisa’s claim of Serk’s abduction; Louisa’s coldness towards her mother is a way to emulate Serk’s scorn and remoteness. As Louisa gets older, her disdain for Anne is replaced by a complex mixture of sympathy and disdain. While Louisa criticizes Tobias for taking Anne’s money because of how difficult Anne’s financial circumstances are, she is annoyed by Tobias’s claims that Anne was young and naïve when she gave Tobias up since Louisa is the same age that Anne was when she had Tobias. Louisa is afraid of making the same mistakes that Anne did, but her decisions recapitulate a marriage much like that of her parents with Roman, a man whom Louisa never gets to know. Through the challenges of this experience, her understanding and patience for Anne grow.

Louisa gains more clarity about Serk’s disappearance whenever she stumbles onto artifacts of the past. This makes her a passive investigator who doesn’t pursue the novel’s central mystery. Instead, her insight is triggered by unanticipated encounters, such as when she visits Hawaii with George and realizes that she had been there before and finally understands the diary entry that ostensibly predicted Serk’s disappearance. However, at the end of the novel, Louisa decides to lie to Serk about Anne’s well-being—an active choice to protect her father from the truth. Though Louisa doubts her decision, Tobias reassures her that it allowed Serk to die with relief. This act mirrors the protective deception that her parents used to protect Louisa when she was young. She resolves her personal conflicts by emulating her parents’ behaviors.

Anne Kang is the novel’s secondary protagonist. She is the wife of Serk and the mother of Louisa and Tobias. Her character arc revolves around the reconciliation of her reckless youth, when she gave birth to and then gave up Tobias, and her more ordered family life with Serk and Louisa. Through she reunites with Tobias, Anne’s past isn’t fully resolved by the novel’s end: Readers do not learn how Anne reckoned with the news of Serk’s survival, nor how she reconciled with her children before she died.

Anne is defined by her Loneliness in Family Life. She was the youngest child in a large family, so she feels distant from her parents as she was mostly raised by her older siblings. This alienation causes her to rebel, leading to her affair with Adrian and the birth of Tobias. The challenges of these outcomes drive Anne to change her life. By the time she meets Serk, she has turned away from her reckless behavior, marking the start of her second life. Anne tells Serk about her upbringing, but never reveals Tobias to either Serk or Louisa out of shame. Nevertheless, Anne accepts that Tobias is a part of her life when she forces herself to explain to Louisa that he is her half-brother in Chapter 7.

Anne develops multiple sclerosis before she moves to Japan, which symbolically points to the challenge of exerting control over her life. In contrast, adapting her lifestyle around the symptoms of her illness signals her resignation to live with things that are beyond her control.

After Serk, Anne marries Walt, who functions as a foil for Anne. Walt is presented as Anne’s opposite, contrasting her irritability and introversion with his generosity and easy-going nature. The more Anne spends time with Walt, however, the more she comes to trust him with her grief, which she never directly shares with Louisa. By the end of Chapter 10, Anne opens up to him about her fears of being a terrible mother, which is more important to her than the reassurance that Walt extends in response.