Once they are separated, their attractions to other men appear to be fueled not by a desire to start fresh but rather by another excuse to push each other further away. Squeezing each other until we were breathless.” Sex becomes the way they relate to each other. Their arguments often lead to sex, “prolonged, frantic.

“After the black eye, we stopped putting our hands on each other,” Ben reveals. Ben and Mike carry those insecurities into their tense, sometimes violent relationship. Ben’s mother left his father after she could no longer put up with his addictions, while Mitsuko tired of Eiju’s joblessness and irresponsibility. Both men hesitate, intellectually ready to end a relationship that isn’t working, but emotionally not quite ready to give up.īen and Mike are both scarred by broken family situations. During their separation, Ben and Mike each meet someone else. At the same time, Mike struggles with reuniting with a father who abandoned his family decades before but now needs him to run his bar and tend to his failing health. Ben and Mitsuko develop a cordial but strained coexistence. Mike immediately leaves her alone with Ben in their apartment to return to Osaka to care for his dying father, Eiju. Early in the story, Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, arrives from Japan for a visit. Four years into their troubled union, each is having significant doubts about their future together. Memorial is about the relationship between two men, Benson (“Ben”), a middle-class African American who works at a daycare center, and Mike, a chef, who was born in Japan but came to the United States as a child. It succeeds because of its raw humanity and how it captures what it means to care about someone. Indeed, Bryan Washington’s Memorialis the kind of novel you can’t put down, but for none of those reasons.

Put all of these ingredients in the hands of a gifted writer, and you would expect nothing less than a fiery page-turner. Add the economic precariousness of underemployment, and alternate the settings between a gentrifying Houston neighborhood and a gritty section of Osaka, Japan. Imagine two young gay men of different races, each of whom has a dysfunctional father and the kind of mother you keep at a careful distance.

Memorial bryan washington