Benson and Mike’s relationship has never been easy and now it’s in a rut. Their fights with words and fists end in sex. Each is unsure about what their relationship is or where its going. Memorial is a modern story of the relationship between two gay men – one Japanese, one a black man – and their relationships with their families.

That loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn’t make them any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn’t diminish the love. It just changes forms.

Sexuality, race, class, trauma and grief are the subjects of Memorial by Bryan Washington.   The story is written in three parts across two locations – Houston and Osaka – and told from the perspective of the two men.  

You’re taking up space in another human’s brain, she said. You’re a foreign entity. A parasite. That’s a lot by itself.

Memorial opens from Benson’s perspective. His partner, Mike has decided to go back to Japan to see his dying father. Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, who Benson has never met arrives to stay the day before Mike leaves. Benson finds himself sharing a house with a Japanese woman he doesn’t know in a predominately black neighbourhood in the throes of gentrification. Mitsuko is disappointed that her son has run off to be with her ex-husband just as she arrives and resists Benson’s attempts to draw her out.

He came out of my body. He’s a homosexual. He left his mother with a stranger. I’ve already got everything I need to know.

Mike arrives in Japan and takes up residence with his estranged, dying father, Eiju, who runs a bar and pretends nothing is wrong. Mike communicates via sporadic text messages with Benson and equally sporadic conversions with his father.

There are a lot of spaces in this novel. The unanswered questions and awkward silences between characters draw your attention to what is not said, revealing that there is as much, if not more meaning in the unspoken than the spoken. A beautifully written insight into the ordinary life of men.