A finalist for this year’s National Book Award, Bryan Washington’s new novel Palaver, like so much of Washington’s work, is a story concerned with family— broken and healing ones; as well as those cobbled together communities we build that can bring solace to our fractured lives.
Revolving around two characters only known as “the mother” and “the son,” the novel opens with the mother’s sudden arrival in Tokyo, where the son has been living estranged from her for over a decade. As a gay black man in Tokyo, it doesn’t sound like an easy gig, but it’s one that the author knows from personal experience. In a 2018 interview in Catapult, Washington, who is now based in Tokyo, talked about his fascination with Japan. Studying Japanese in high school, he’d always wanted to visit. But he was worried about how people in one of the most racially homogeneous countries in the world would react to him. Japan can be a hostile place for foreigners. When he finally arrived, though, contrary to his expectations, he felt safe. And the sprawling and frenetic city becomes a harbor from the homophobia he experienced back home. It was somewhere he knew that the police won’t shoot him.
We see how this might have unfolded for Washington in the pages of the novel, when what starts as a temporary move for the character turns into a decade. Living in a gay-friendly neighborhood near Shinjuku and working as an English teacher, “the son” spends his evenings drinking in an izakaya, sometimes sneaking into a nearby love hotel with a Japanese man, who is himself married to a woman who won’t give him a divorce—another broken family.
Or is it just another riff on family? Maybe one that doesn’t fit society’s expectations but suits the people involved well enough.
The son and his mother have an uneasy relationship—mainly caused by an older brother, who is homophobic and in jail for selling cocaine laced with fentanyl. Despite feeling more at home in Japan, his emotional wounds are not easy to heal, and even after ten years, he experiences severe panic attacks. On occasion, he would write letters to his brother that he never sent. The mother, worried about his emotional state, travels to Tokyo. With her arrival, we get so many of those vivid, provocative conversations that have made Washington’s writing famous and also allude to the title of the novel. The two start their healing journey by agreeing to talk, and before we know it, they embark on a momentous trip to Nara.
Jean-Paul Sartre once said that “hell is other people.” Well in Washington’s stories, “hell” can be just that. But more often than not, other people can be heaven. At least they are in Japan, where the son finds intimacy and love not just with his lover, but also with a group of friends and three of his English students. These people form a kind of found family. In the words of the izakaya owner:
‘“We’re there for each other,” said Alan. “We’re all we have. Me, you, and the rest. We’re here, and then we’re gone, but we can be here for each other.”’
In an interview in the New Yorker about a short story that was a byproduct of the novel, Washington discussed his intentional choice to write an optimistic book. And without a doubt, this is what stands out so much about this book. Washington’s work is refreshing to see, and its positive, upbeat outlook stands out compared to other literary prize-winning fiction, as if the heart of literary fiction there is required to be an ordeal. Although Palaver does contain sensitive and traumatic content, it is difficult to define it as a trauma work. For those who don’t fit into society’s modes of expected behavior, of course there is pain and isolation.
Prior to writing the novel, Washington says he suffered a health scare in the US. His experience in hospitals was alienating and at times down-right insulting. For example, when one doctor learned he was taking PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis), the doctor told him that all these health scares were happening because he had not prioritized Jesus in his life. But was this a judgement that only happens in America? But at the same time, his chosen family—his best friends and boyfriend, even several acquaintances, stepped up to help him in his time of need.
The term “step up for someone” is repeated often in the novel, because it is the heart of the story. In the New Yorker interview mentioned above, Washington mentions a quote from Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, translated by Shanna Tan, where a character notes the different ways that folks helped him in his ordeals, and it feels remarkably astute: “People around me. When I was trying to be indifferent, they did the same for me. Even though I didn’t say anything, they seemed to sense my feelings, so none of them tried to make a fuss to comfort me or worry about me. I felt like I was being accepted for who I am. I never had to struggle to explain myself, or to reject who I was. And now that I’m older, I’m starting to think like this . . .”
Perhaps something similar is happening in those wildly popular and oddly comforting murder mysteries, like Grantchester and Only Murders in the Building. Amidst all the death (how many people are even left alive in Oxford with so many murder mysteries set there?), still, the experience of watching or reading unfold is one of the warmest, fuzziest experiences around. Why? Besides the murders, the people are so damn nice to each other. They tease and provoke, and yet they show up in the exact ways we see in any Bryan Washington novel. It’s something that is not just pleasurable but deeply moving.
His new novel could sit alongside any of the best “found family” stories of all time: TV shows like Cheers and Friends, books like Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, or the delightful Vera Wong murder mystery series, my own favorite guilty pleasure. And his new novel accomplishes this without any explanation or telling. Except for some backstory about the mother in Jamaica and the older brother in Houston, the majority of the story takes place in the present moment, as things unfold in the scene. And reading along, without being told as such, we feel how the son is healing in his new home, among his friends.
One critic in the Japan Times wondered why the novel needed to be set among the expat community (and the Japanese people who engage with these expats). What if the son had Japanese-speaking friends? What if we felt more about life in the “real Japan”?
But why not the expat community? My own two decades in Japan were spent in a very different way, though I did have three or four years in Tokyo with expat friends. But then, after leaving Tokyo and moving to the countryside, my life became increasingly enmeshed with Japanese-speaking friends and later family. My personal experience was that the warmth and security that Washington depicted among his expat found family was exactly what I felt with my Japanese friends and family. He depicts something universal: the way companionship can make life beautiful.
As I was reading, I kept thinking how, maybe more than anything, Palaver is reminiscent of the cast of characters that come in and out of the hit TV show Midnight Diner—also set in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, with its mysterious chef known as “Master,” and the lives of his Japanese customers. In many ways, the customers, like the friends in Washington’s novel, could be called outsiders, even if not expats. In the show, these outsiders, each of whom has experienced interpersonal troubles and social anxieties, would come together in each episode, and in the words of a Washington character, show up for one another.
Washington is one of the least cynical and most undeniably optimistic American writers working today. And this book will make you feel like your heart is going to crack open, because the people are so lovable, even in their mistakes. And if this was not reason enough to be lauded, his writing is incredibly evocative. The city of Tokyo is also a character. His earlier novels, Memorial (2020) and Family Meal (2023), also featured many scenes set in Japan, mainly in the Kansai region, such as Osaka. However, Palaver takes place exclusively within the country, except for some flashbacks.
Washington’s Japan is not the place of temple bells and manicured gardens we have become familiar with in a Pico Iyer book, but rather a city of neighborhoods. This is one of the oldest tropes used to describe Tokyo, after all: a great city of villages, each identified by the train line it has, with its heart the station. The son’s neighborhood is a place full of Taiwanese restaurants, stir-fry shops, and Korean BBQ dens; of Nigerian butchers, K-pop shops and fandom stores. He has even included dozens of black-and-white photographs—his street photography, interspersed in the pages of the novel. It is transportive in the best way that fiction can be.
Told in his spare and propulsive style, the novel even makes room for text messages with plenty of emojis. This is Japan, after all.
