Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Overview

“This brilliant debut novel by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is cause for celebration.”—Lorrie Moore

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki’s son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront his mother’s abandonment of him when he was only two years old.

The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki’s life is unmoored. Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds that asks—and ultimately answers—how does a mother desert her son?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324000747
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/28/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is a British-Japanese-Chinese-American novelist. She received a BA from Columbia University and currently resides in the UK. Harmless Like You won an Authors' Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a 2017 NPR Great Read.

Editorial Reviews

11/28/2016
At the onset of Buchanan’s debut, a son shows up at the doorstep of his mother, Yuki, in Berlin after a 30-year separation. Jay’s there to settle Yuki’s inheritance—a house in Connecticut—after his father is killed in a car accident. The story of what prompted Yuki to abandon her family, as well as the details of Jay’s life as a New York gallery owner and recent father, unspool in sections stretching from 1968 to the present. Some parts are more effective than others. After her parents move back to Japan when she’s 16 and leave her in America, Yuki’s push to find love and purpose as an artist takes on a myopic urgency that teeters toward mania. It’s therefore no surprise that she drops out of school, stays in an abusive relationship too long before marrying Jay’s doting father, and becomes a suburban mother, all with creativity-crushing consequences. In contrast, Jay’s ineptitude—at staying loyal to his wife, caring for his “inarticulate pink flesh-sack” of a baby, and facing his emotions—reads like a series of temper tantrums. When mother and son bond over Jay’s ailing cat in Berlin, the union feels too easy given the depth of their estrangement. Still, Buchanan has a knack for mining the murky depths of what it means to identify as an artist, parent, and lover. The journey is sometimes tender, often agonizing—and everything in between. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"What a beautiful book. So measured and confident for a debut – really impressive stuff. The fine brushwork of a meticulous student of the human condition (and I love the use of all the painting/colour descriptions – so effective) set within the rich, widescreen drama of a bold and visionary storyteller. It's like staring at a stone at the bottom of a very clear, but slowly shifting, lake. An enchanting and deftly layered exploration of desire, self-identity and belonging."

Jane Unsworth

"The brilliant debut novel by Rowan Buchanan is cause for celebration."

Lorrie Moore

"Moving from Manhattan to Berlin, from the Vietnam War to the new millennium, Buchanan's debut explores the thin line between attachment and abandonment, love and pain, selfishness and sacrifice. With kaleidoscopic prose and characters all too human, Harmless Like You is an unforgettable debut, as rich in darkness and light as it is in color."

Chloe Benjamin

"Shuttling deftly between mother and son, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's passionate, gorgeously-written debut novel investigates harmlessness and harm, power and vulnerability, free will and fate."

Ellis Avery

"In Harmless Like You, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan tells the parallel stories of Yuki, a Japanese teenager living on her own in 1960s’ New York, and Jay, her abandoned son who, in the 1980s, questions the family life he’s chosen. With luminous prose, unflinching honesty, and compelling narrative drive, Buchanan examines Yuki and Jay’s respective quests for companionship and safety and meaning, all the while asking, What is home? What does the face of love look like? To what extent should we honor the artistic and creative? Which is more dangerous: loneliness or intimacy? At once harrowing and reassuring, rash and generous, impetuously youthful and imbued with the wisdom that comes with perspective and distance, Harmless Like You is a stunning debut that reads like the work of a seasoned novelist."

Judith Mitchell

"Buchanan’s prose is visceral, startling and mind-bendingly gorgeous. . . .worth reading for the beauty and originality of the prose, for the questions Buchanan raises about art and heritage, and for the characters who are sometimes as maddening as they can be magnificent."

Boston Globe

"Rowan Hisayo Buchanan writes with beauty and sensitivity about what it means to be an artist, a parent, and an outsider in a foreign culture."

New York Journal of Books

"Buchanan's prose is lyrical and evocative… [She] reminds us, the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today."

The New York Times Book Review

"This is a book I’ve been waiting for since before its author was born. And yet I could never have predicted it. It is a book about beauty and belonging, suffering and being lost, a book that takes into account history, the implications of separation and disorientation. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan cleaves to her idiosyncrasies, foregoing whitewash in favor of her own glittering vision. She is “the seer, not the seen.” The result is a gift—unassuming, elegant, vividly prismatic. Not since Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God has a book shone such a moving light on multiracial, interracial, and transnational relationships. Regardless of your flesh tone, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s study of color—its history, its strangeness, its allure, and its consequences—will dazzle you."

Jennifer Tseng

"Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut is a beautifully textured novel. . . Yuki’s story feels compellingly immediate, as prickly and unpredictable as its protagonist."

Washington Post

"The kind of novel our century deserves—a brilliantly conceived, beautifully written transnational novel about multiracial identity, motherhood, the struggle to be an artist, and the struggle to belong to your family. This marks the debut of an important new voice in fiction."

Alexander Chee

01/01/2017
Buchanan's debut novel is an intriguingly told tale of a mother and the son she abandoned at age two. In 1968, when her parents return to Japan from New York, teenage Yuki stays behind, moving in with her best and only friend, Odile, and Odile's mother. Her son Jay's story, told alternately in first person (Yuki's story is in third person), opens in June 2016 with Jay as a new father. As the novel progresses, Yuki moves out to live with the abusive Lou and eventually finds refuge in marriage to a longtime friend who encourages her interest in art. Eventually, Yuki and Jay's worlds come together as Jay seeks out his mother after his father's passing. VERDICT While the author skillfully handles the alternating story lines, the focus on Yuki means that readers do not get a complete sense of Jay's upbringing without his mother, only the knowledge of his resentment toward her. Nevertheless, Buchanan's initial effort is a worthy page-turner for those who appreciate stories focusing on families and relationships.—Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA

Library Journal

2016-12-26
Even the meek and mild can unwittingly cause long-lasting harm to the people they love.Jay was 2 when his mother abandoned him and his dad, and it's been many years since he probed the reasons for her disappearance. But now that he's a father himself, he worries that he'll be unable to love his daughter and sustain a relationship with his wife, Mimi. Will he, like his mom, be suffocated by domesticity? Will he be able to stifle the impulse to flee? On top of these concerns, Jay is in mourning. Shortly after Mimi gave birth, his beloved dad, Edison, suddenly died. Even more shocking, Edison left his Connecticut home to his ex-wife, Yuki, Jay's estranged mom. Thanks to a quick internet search, Jay discovers that Yuki now lives in Berlin and has become a somewhat successful artist. Jay's decision to pay her an unannounced visit—not only to have her sign the inheritance documents, but to get answers to questions he's obsessed over since childhood—unleashes long-repressed anxieties. Not surprisingly, when the pair finally meets, the encounter is awkward and tense, at least initially. Before their paths cross, however, the novel takes readers back in time to reveal Yuki's personal history. As you'd expect, it's intricate, layered, and complex, filled with missed connections and disappointments. Readers learn, for example, that Yuki was the only Japanese-American student in her New York City class, and while the novel doesn't directly address race, Yuki's isolation, and the resultant insecurity and depression it caused, paints a vivid picture of an unmoored woman whose emotional disquiet led her to become both victim and victimizer. A highly-nuanced, understated, and beautifully written debut.

Kirkus Reviews

"[Buchanan] find[s] ways of depicting difference, painting characters from numerous races and cultures.… Her ways of infusing a character’s culture have more to do with habits and perspective than with pigeonholes, making this the rare debut that does not smack of received knowledge."

Literary Hub

"In Harmless Like You… characters look for ways to reconcile themselves with their histories, though in vastly different and sometimes opposing ways."

Guardian

"Harmless Like You is a refreshing, bold book about understatement."

Sunday Telegraph

"[T]here are so many mature notions of patience, sacrifice, and terrible sadness that it’s startling to realize how young the author of the book is."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Buchanan’s prose is lyrical and evocative.… After all, Buchanan reminds us, the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today."

New York Times Book Review

"Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is only 26 and [Harmless Like You] is a stunning debut that would make a writer four times her years proud."

Elle Canada

"Harmless Like You is a beautifully written, many-layered novel that, at its core, tells the personal story of a mother and a son—a struggling artist and the child she left behind in pursuit of that art."

Bustle

"This elegant and moving novel burns slowly, building in intensity as it develops to explore the subjects of identity, alienation and desire."

Daily Mail

"A relentlessly honest book, capturing some of the ugliest and under-represented facets of life, in rich, elegant prose."

Irish Independent

This debut audiobook features a unique look at characters who are simply trying to figure out who they are and how they might find some purpose and joy in life. Shifts in time and viewpoint present listening challenges, but easily identifiable characters, and clear and crisply paced performances from both narrators provide skillful guidance. Narrator Emily Woo Zeller captures the angst of young Japanese transplant Yuki, who struggles to fit into the New York City art scene and then into the suburban world of a housewife in the 1960s and ‘70s. P.J. Ochlan's portrayal of Yuki’s son, Jay, is a bit wooden initially but gains intensity and animation as family challenges cause him to mature. Buchanan's gifts for lyrical description and nuanced character development, ably presented by Zeller and Ochlan, create an appealing audiobook. M.O.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

MAY 2017 - AudioFile