A good portion of Memorial (Riverhead Books, 2020), Bryan Washington’s debut novel, is set in and around a six-stool bar in Osaka, Japan, where regulars descend after work to sip sake and chat with the owner. I’ve been there! I thought early on in the book. And I had—sort of: so visceral is Washington’s evocation of a Japanese bolt-hole that I was instantly plunked back down on my own stool in an alleyway bar in Tokyo’s Kagurazaka neighborhood, where I’d stayed on my last international trip in January 2020. No matter that Tokyo and Osaka are two very different cities, or that one bar exists in fact and the other in fiction. I’ve been to both.
The bar wasn’t the only place I recognized in Washington’s novel, which uses other, squishier concepts as destinations: lands you can know of, but never truly know if you haven’t been and stayed there awhile. In this story, which centers on the relationship between two men across continents and complications, one of those lands is grief. Another is identity rooted in race and class—of feelings and experiences shared and confessed in confidence, maybe, but never able to be fully felt by the other.
In the book, we learn about the relationship of these men via their turns as narrator. Mike, a Japanese American, Houston-based chef, returns to Osaka to care for his ill father, who abandoned his family, just as Mike’s mother arrives in Houston to stay. Benson, a Black daycare teacher, plays host to Mike’s mother all while wondering when Mike will return, and whether he even wants him to. The physical distance—those 6,882 miles between them, that 15-hour time difference—only widens the emotional distance between the partners. What was a crack soon becomes a chasm.
Through Mike and Benson, we also learn about the tangled relationship each has to the cities where much of the action is set: Osaka and Houston, respectively. Thanks to Washington’s rich detail about neighborhoods and restaurants, in many ways, the cities themselves serve as additional characters, imploring us to ask: What does home really look like?
We hope you will read Memorial along with us this month. To share your thoughts and questions, please join us on Thursday, March 4, at 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET for a Zoom discussion of the book.
Yours in praise of Japanese bars, Katherine LaGrave Digital features editor
A good portion of Memorial (Riverhead Books, 2020), Bryan Washington’s debut novel, is set in and around a six-stool bar in Osaka, Japan, where regulars descend after work to sip sake and chat with the owner. I’ve been there! I thought early on in the book. And I had—sort of: so visceral is Washington’s evocation of a Japanese bolt-hole that I was instantly plunked back down on my own stool in an alleyway bar in Tokyo’s Kagurazaka neighborhood, where I’d stayed on my last international trip in January 2020. No matter that Tokyo and Osaka are two very different cities, or that one bar exists in fact and the other in fiction. I’ve been to both.
The bar wasn’t the only place I recognized in Washington’s novel, which uses other, squishier concepts as destinations: lands you can know of, but never truly know if you haven’t been and stayed there awhile. In this story, which centers on the relationship between two men across continents and complications, one of those lands is grief. Another is identity rooted in race and class—of feelings and experiences shared and confessed in confidence, maybe, but never able to be fully felt by the other.
In the book, we learn about the relationship of these men via their turns as narrator. Mike, a Japanese American, Houston-based chef, returns to Osaka to care for his ill father, who abandoned his family, just as Mike’s mother arrives in Houston to stay. Benson, a Black daycare teacher, plays host to Mike’s mother all while wondering when Mike will return, and whether he even wants him to. The physical distance—those 6,882 miles between them, that 15-hour time difference—only widens the emotional distance between the partners. What was a crack soon becomes a chasm.
Through Mike and Benson, we also learn about the tangled relationship each has to the cities where much of the action is set: Osaka and Houston, respectively. Thanks to Washington’s rich detail about neighborhoods and restaurants, in many ways, the cities themselves serve as additional characters, imploring us to ask: What does home really look like?
We hope you will read Memorial along with us this month. To share your thoughts and questions, please join us on Thursday, March 4, at 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET for a Zoom discussion of the book.
Yours in praise of Japanese bars,
Katherine LaGrave
Digital features editor