What is Memorial about?

Memorial begins with a swap: Benson, a Black American childcare worker in Houston, and his Japanese boyfriend Mike are in a troubled relationship when Mike's estranged father calls from Japan — he is dying. Mike flies to Osaka. His mother, Mitsuko, flies from Osaka to Houston. For several weeks, Benson and Mitsuko — who have never met — share Mike's apartment while Mike tries to reconnect with the father he resents. The novel alternates perspectives between the two households and the two men.

On the surface this is a romantic comedy setup. In practice it's a quiet, precise novel about families as ecosystems of unspoken injury and unexpressed love. Mitsuko is not comic relief; she is a fully realized person with her own grief, her own opacity, her own way of showing care through cooking. Benson and Mike's relationship is troubled in ways that are never reduced to a single cause. Washington is interested in the accumulation of small failures and accommodations that define long-term intimacy more than in dramatic ruptures.

Washington came to fiction from a short story collection, Lot, also set in Houston, and Memorial has that book's texture: Houston itself — the heat, the food, the specific topography of the city's neighborhoods — is a presence rather than backdrop. The novel is written in short, declarative sentences with almost no emotional announcement. Characters show feeling through what they cook, eat, and say about food; the novel's emotional register is largely communicated through meals.

Memorial is a book for readers who trust accumulated detail over explicit statement, and who find queer domesticity — the ordinary texture of two people sharing a space — as interesting a subject as queer drama. It is not a book with strong forward momentum or a climactic confrontation. What it builds toward is an honest, unresolved picture of two people deciding whether they want the same thing, which turns out to be harder to render than most novels suggest.