Memorial

Bryan Washington

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838950095
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

'This feels like a vision for the 21st-century novel... It made me happy'
Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Benson and Mike are two young guys who have been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past, while back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted...

Funny and profound, Memorial is about family in all its strange forms, becoming who you're supposed to be and the outer limits of love.

NAMED A BOOK TO WATCH IN 2021 BY:

SUNDAY TIMES | THE TIMES | DAILY MAIL | THE TELEGRAPH | RADIO 4 | IRISH TIMES

My fam’s last apartment was the largest. Once we’d made it to the States we bounced from Alief to the South Side to the West Loop, settling wherever Eiju could keep a job, and this new spot off Bellaire was way way way way way over budget. We weren’t skipping meals or anything but my folks were always strapped. Neither of their families in Japan were helping us. As far as they were concerned, we’d left. We had to figure shit out on our own.

The new complex had us parking under these busted-ass streetlights. You’d push a buzzer to open the gate but the gate just wouldn’t budge so the Filipinos smoking by the basketball court would drag it open for whatever quarters you kept in your car. Ma told Eiju that something had to change. Had to be him, or our surroundings. I’m realizing all of this later. You don’t see any of that shit when you’re a kid; you don’t have the context to flesh it all out.

I hadn’t started expanding yet, eating the entire world, but once my clothes stopped fitting Ma just stuffed me into Eiju’s. They were the fits he’d brought from Osaka. All baseball jerseys and tank tops and mesh shorts, and Eiju never thought he’d need them again but Ma wouldn’t let him trash anything and here they were, eleven years later, halfway across the world, and every now and then I’d catch a blip of myself in the mirror, thinking that this is what my father must’ve looked like as a kid.

That summer in Bellaire, Ma and I lazed around the new spot. Eiju didn’t want her out in the world. That shit had less to do with tradition than with his very particular vanity—but Ma entertained it anyway. At least at first. Less out of allegiance to her man, I think, than something else entirely.

The place was big but our pipes stank. Our carpet stank. The tap water stank. Eventually cash got even tighter than it already was. Eiju’s shouting turned physical, shoving and pushing and squeezing, and Ma started planning her escape, but we spent that season revolving around our living room.

I picked up cardboard boxes left over from the last move and set them back down. Ma watched soaps on the television—Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless; Ma swore that shit was bad for me but I’d still post up on the sofa beside her. She’d mouth phrases in Japanese—the Tokyo Japanese she’d grown up with—and ask me to spit them back at her. When Eiju overheard, he’d ask Ma, in Kansai dialect, why I wasn’t speaking fucking English.

Some days, Ma and I kicked our bare feet under the kitchen table. That was our thing. I was still twelve. I’d touch my heel with her heel and her toes with my toes. We’d keep them there until one of us pulled away but the one who gave up was always me. Ma could stay stone-faced through anything. Which was a sign, I think. Even then.

But again: hindsight, 20/20.

Eiju lost his gig that fall. He’d been prepping at this Chinese restaurant on Dashwood. Some strip mall enclave. He blamed his fate on the Mexicans, who cooked longer hours for less pay, and Eiju joined the tiny constellation Ma and I had constructed—but our orbit couldn’t support him. He threw everything off.

Whenever we sat at the table, he’d ask why we were wasting time.

Whenever we flipped on the television, he’d flip it right back off.

Then he’d drink up what little we saved. Had Ma counting coins at the end of the month. One night, I knelt beside her, sorting dimes into piles, sprawled on the carpet, and when I found a quarter lodged in the sofa, my mother actually collapsed in tears. She straight-up wouldn’t stop shaking. Eiju had no idea. He was still snoring from yesterday’s binge.

Eventually Ma finessed a situation selling discounted jewelry by the Galleria. You rarely found anyone speaking fluent Japanese in Houston. The manager was a Hawaiian transplant, an older Black dude, and he hired Ma on the spot, and eventually Eiju found another job bartending for white people around West U and their incomes were enough to keep us mostly afloat. But we didn’t know all that would happen.

So every glare and shove and yell between my parents felt irreparable. Intolerable. Like the craziest shit that’d ever occurred. And one night, after an argument that sent Eiju flying right out of the house, I asked Ma why we didn’t just move back to Setagaya, as if everything would’ve been better if we simply went back home.

She looked at me for a long time. Her makeup was smeared. Her cheeks were patchy.

Then she said, That isn’t your home.

Ma said, We’re here now. This is your home.

She didn’t sound too sure about it, even then. Maybe she hadn’t quite convinced herself. And, of course, about a decade later, a while after Eiju split for good, she’d pack all her shit and fly to Tokyo and my mother would not come back.

But before that—our apartment with the gates.

Roaches on the carpet.

Our feet under the table, grazing in the heat.

Ma would set her lips on my earlobe, whispering all sorts of shit in Japanese, enunciating in the most ridiculous tones, until I fell out of the chair from laughter, only having picked up like half of it, and it was only later on that I’d think about what she was actually saying, that it was all just the same thing, frantic and unending: I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!

• • •

After a week in Osaka, I came up with something like a routine: I’d make it out of the apartment around eight in the evening, to prep Eiju’s bar. It sat a few minutes from his busted walk-up in Tennoji, beside a bakery and a tattered bookstore and another walk-up and two parking lots and like sixteen love hotels. The streets were always quiet except for the other third-shift folks running last-minute errands before work. You didn’t have to walk too far from the nearest station to reach us, but it wasn’t like we ever actually opened before ten and most guests stayed well past midnight either way.

I spent hours mopping and scrubbing and wiping. Or at least I’d start to, until Eiju popped in. He’d put me on the broom until it clicked in his head that I could actually help him, that this was my area of fucking expertise, and then he stopped showing up to the bar until he absolutely had to.

This was probably the only reason he didn’t send me back to fucking Houston.

Or at least...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Benson
• Mike
• Benson
• Acknowledgements