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.
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