Memorial: the anatomy of a break-up?

What is this about?

Ben and Mike have beenslowly breaking up for awhile now. When Mike discovers his father is dying, he leaves Ben in Houston and returns to Japan to make some sort of peace with his father. Ben, on the other hand, is left playing host toMitsuko, Mike’s mother who has come to visit.

What else is this about?

Race, relationships and family.

Blurb

A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson’s a Black day care teacher, and they’ve 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 in Texas 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. 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. Without Mike’s immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they’ve ever known. And just maybe they’ll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you’re supposed to be, and the limits of love.

Memorial is going to be a difficult book for me to review beause I change my mind about whether I like it, or the sharp edges of its characters make them too unlikeable for me.

Ben and Mike have been living together for years now, but, they have been breaking apart for some time now. They don’t speak about their issues, they have sex instead.

Ben is Black and Mike is Japanese, and they live in a multicultural neighbourhoood with very different reactions to it.

When Mike discovers that his father is dying in Japan, he leaves Ben to go visit — actually, he leaves Ben playing host to his mother who has returned to visit him. Mitsuko is a mix of anger and resignation at her son, but she remains with Ben in this apartment while Mike returns to visit the man she never wanted in their lives.

Ben and Mitsuko are an odd pair to say the lest — they don’t know each other and Ben lives around her. Racism too is part of Mitsuko’s reaction to Ben knowing Japanese ingredients she is using in her cooking.

They are linked by Mike though, and they start to find this uneasy balance. It’s the journey to that balance that actually brought me around in regards to this book because until then I wasn’t really sure if I was going to continue reading.

For me, Washington was better at writing Ben, and he managed to draw me in to his work (day care, and hr’s good with kids), his friendships and his relationship with Mike. We also learn about his family; about his relationship with his father in particular. His family can’t admit he’s gay either. so as much as Mike’s parents and his relationship with them drive the narrative in this book, Ben’s issues with his own that play a part in it too.

I began thinking Memorial might be a reference to all the things that are ending in this book — lives and relationships — as much as it is a reference to the neighbourhood in which it is set.

Mike’s story isn’t one that I could get lost in as much as Ben’s, unfortunately. I wished this book focused on Ben and Mitsuko more, thrown together by their links to Mike. However, Mike goes through his own journey with his father in Japan, trying to come to terms with their past and where they find themselves now. Relationships with fathers, I should say, play a big part in both their lives, shaping who they have become.

Both Mike and Ben share the good in the perspectives on their relationship, and it helps to understand why these two men who seem so at odds with each other right now were ever in a relationship. It’s Mitsuko who puts their relationship into perspective: whatever happens to them in the end, their time together wasn’t a waste. They had a purpose being in each other’s lives, no matter how it ends.

Which I suppose is something we wish we could say about most things, I think.