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WORK TITLE: Harmless Like You
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://rowanhisayo.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.foyles.co.uk/Author-Rowan-Hisayo-Buchanan * https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/harmless-like-you-by-rowan-hisayo-buchanan/2017/03/06/067cbc66-ff8b-11e6-8ebe-6e0dbe4f2bca_story.html?utm_term=.601658cbc0f2
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016151120
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016151120
HEADING: Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo
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100 1_ |a Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo
375 __ |a female
670 __ |a Harmless like you, 2016 |b title page (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan) jacket flap (a Japanese-British-Chinese-American writer who has a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently working on a PhD at the University of East Anglia)
670 __ |a Harmless like you, 2017: |b CIP title page (Rwan Hisayo Buchanan) data view (“Rowan Hisayo Buchanan received a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellowship”)
670 __ |a e-mail 2017-01-30 fr. C. Reinertsen, W.W. Norton :b CIP t.p. (Citizenship: “USA & U.K.” Country of residence: “This is harder as it varies a lot. At the time of writing it was the USA, but at the moment it is the U.K.”)
670 __ |a OCLC 962896323: |b (Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo. Harmless like you. London : Sceptre, 2016; cataloged by ZCU as PS36702.U252 .H37)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, B.A.; University of Wisconsin–Madison, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Asian American Writers’ Workshop fellowship, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributor to print and online publications, including Guardian; Paris Review, Rumpus; Electric Literature; Guernica; Harvard Review; Catapult; White Review; Margins; Indiana Review; Tin House; TriQuarterly; Flash Europa 28; Public Books; Apogee Journal; and No Tokens.
SIDELIGHTS
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan earned a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A 2015 recipient of an Asian American Writers’ Workshop fellowship, Buchanan has written for publications including the London Guardian, Paris Review, Guernica; Harvard Review; Indiana Review; Tin House; and TriQuarterly, as well as several online journals. She is editor of Go Home!, an anthology of Asian and Asian-American writing, and author of the novel Harmless Like You.
Jay, one of the novel’s two protagonists, is struggling with deep emotional conflicts. He has recently become a father and worries that he does not feel a strong bond with his infant daughter or with his wife, Mimi. He fears that, like his estranged mother, he will fail as a parent. At the same time, Jay is mourning the death of his father, Edison, who was killed in a car accident on his way to meet Jay’s baby daughter. The fact that Edison has left his estate to his ex-wife, Yuki, forces Jay to arrange a meeting with the mother he has not seen since he was a toddler.
Jay discovers that Yuki now lives in Berlin and has become a successful performance artist. Needing her signature on legal documents, he decides to fly to Berlin unannounced in hopes that he can finally learn why she had chosen to leave the family so many years earlier. The decision is a difficult one for Jay, reawakening deep anxieties and unhappy memories.
Meanwhile, a second narrative thread tells Yuki’s story. It begins fifty years earlier, in the late 1960s, when she is a sensitive and unhappy teenager in New York City and feeling alienated from both her Japanese heritage and from mainstream American culture. When her parents decide to move back to Japan, Yuki stays behind and moves in with her best friend. Sensing that her destiny is to be an artist, Yuki strives toward this goal while also struggling with loneliness and disconnection. She drops out of school, endures a relationship with an abusive man, and eventually marries Edison, who provides her with a safe suburban life in Connecticut. But Yuki comes to realize that comfort and safety can stifle creativity. Feeling suffocated in her role as wife and mother, she finally makes the decision to break away and be the artist she was meant to be.
Reviews welcomed Harmless Like You as an accomplished and promising debut. Writing in the Washington Post, Fran Bigman described the novel as a “beautifully textured” exploration of vulnerability, victimhood, and the need for artistic expression and human connection. For New York Times contributor Namara Smith, the novel’s chief appeal is its focus on “the romance of New York City in the 1960s and ’70s, a place and time imagined as a bohemian paradise full of both danger and opportunity,” all of which seduce the naive young Yuki. Smith praised Buchanan’s prose as “lyrical and evocative, if occasionally overdone,” citing the author’s striking descriptions of colors to illuminate Yuki’s artistic sensibility. Acknowledging the sensual power of such language, the reviewer nevertheless felt that it creates a “nostalgic haze” through which “Yuki remains indistinct … [and is] overwhelmed by the meticulously styled tableaux constructed around her.” In Smith’s view, Jay–who seems at first to be a secondary character in the novel–becomes a stronger and more completely developed character than does Yuki.
L.A. Review of Books contributor Ilana Masad commented on the novel’s unstated but powerful subtext about race. Much of Yuki’s teenage behavior stems from her desire to copy her best friend, Odile, who is blonde, sexy, and rebellious. As Masad pointed out: Yuki “wants to fit in, to be sexy, to be blonder–in other words, whiter. This is the subtle message woven into Yuki’s first friendship, one that continues to thrive on Yuki’s envy and Odile’s need to have a sidekick more than actual pleasure in each other’s company.” Discussing the novel’s treatment of the theme of art, the reviewer stated: “It’s hard to describe art well in fiction, but the concepts Buchanan gives Yuki to work with are both brilliant and brilliantly gimmicky.” These include a series made when Yuki was in her twenties of photographs of all the girls she had never been, and a photo series from her more mature years showing various kinds of white food on white plates–her comment on culture and race.
A writer for Publishers Weekly found Yuki a well-drawn and complex character but Jay less so; in addition, the reviewer said that the eventual mother-son reunion “feels too easy given the depth of their estrangement.” Nevertheless, the reviewer concluded by praising Buchanan’s achievement in “mining the murky depths of what it means to identify as an artist, parent, and lover.” In Kirkus Reviews, a contributor hailed Harmless Like You as a “highly-nuanced, understated, and beautifully written debut.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, March, 2017, Arlene McKanic, review of Harmless Like You, p. 17.
Guardian (London, England), July 7, 2017, Emily Rhodes, review of Harmless Like You.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2017, review of Harmless Like You.
L.A. Review of Books, February 28, 2017, Ilana Masad, review of Harmless Like You.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Shirley Quan, review of Harmless Like You, p. 86.
New York Times, March 10, 2017, Namara Smith, review of Harmless Like You.
Publishers Weekly, November 28, 2016, review of Harmless Like You, p. 40.
Washington Post, March 6, 2017, Fran Bigman, review of Harmless Like You.
ONLINE
National Public Radio Web Site, http://www.npr.org/ (August 22, 2017), Scott Simon, “Weekend Edition Saturday” interview with Buchanan.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Home Page, http://rowanhisayo.com (August 22, 2017).
Weird Sister, http://weird-sister.com/ (August 22, 2017), Kati Heng, “I Can’t Rank My Loyalties: An Interview with Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.”*
My novel Harmless Like You is published by Sceptre (Hachette) in the UK, Canada, & Australia. In the USA, it’s published by Norton. For more information on that and other work, please see My Writing.
To contact me please see my contact page.
I’m British, Japanese, Chinese, and American—hyphenation and ordering vary depending on the day. I have a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from the UW-Madison, and a 2015 Asian American Writers’ Workshop fellowship.
The blog is a notebook where I record other people’s writing that I find beautiful, photographs I’ve taken, and some painted doodles.
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
'Harmless Like You' Is A Story Of How Hurts Are Inherited
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February 25, 20178:28 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
NPR's Scott Simon talks to author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan about her debut novel, Harmless Like You, a story of how we inherit pain from our parents, and inevitably pass it to our descendants.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
"Harmless Like You" is a multigenerational story about the ways in which hurts can be inherited and inflict pain but also wisdom on innocent descendants. It is Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's very first book. She joins us now from Norwich in the United Kingdom. Thank you very much for being with us.
ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: Please tell us about your central character, if we could, Yuki. She's a teenager living in New York in the late '60s. And her parents leave to go back to Japan, and she decides she doesn't want to leave New York. Does she leave them, too?
BUCHANAN: I don't think that she would see it that way. I think she doesn't realize how long it will be before she ever sees them again because, at that time, it would have been harder for her to travel. And she is trying to figure out herself in the city, and she doesn't want them to see her until she's figured it out. And the figuring out takes a lot longer than she thinks it's going to. To answer your question another way, at least in my experience, I think children rarely realize how much their parents need them.
SIMON: She ends up with a guy I don't like at all, Lou. Without giving anything away, he's the only one in the novel I think is guilty of anything really serious.
BUCHANAN: I'm sure somebody could write a novel about a man like Lou where you would understand exactly his history and exactly where he was coming from. But in my novel, he hurts Yuki both physically and emotionally, I think. And she is not completely able to understand why.
SIMON: So Lou hurts Yuki, and Yuki winds up, years later, getting married, having a little boy named Jay and hurting her husband and, more to the point, her little boy when she leaves them. Is that the bank shot of life?
BUCHANAN: That we just pass on hurt and pain?
SIMON: Yeah.
BUCHANAN: I hope not. I think it can be. We do pass on pain to the people around us, but I think another way of looking at that is that the people who hurt us are rarely evil. Most people are trying their best with the pain that they've been given. And I think both main characters in my book are trying to figure out what that best is. So I don't want to sort of describe in too much detail why she leaves her son, but I think at the time that she does it, she thinks it's not only the best thing for herself, but, more importantly, she thinks it's the best thing for him.
SIMON: It must be hard to write a novel and ask people to identify with a mother who would do that.
BUCHANAN: Yes, but I think also one of the great gifts of fiction is that it asks us to stretch our empathy. And I find that often when people talk about motherhood, there is - you hold up this ideal. And if someone doesn't meet that ideal, they must be terrible and an evil person. And I knew from the get-go that my protagonist was not an evil person. And so a lot of the endeavor of the book for me as a writer was finding out - well, why would this person leave her child?
SIMON: Do you mind if I ask about your mother?
BUCHANAN: Sure. Go ahead. Ask my mother.
SIMON: She suffers from a pretty rare disorder, and it relates to your literature, at least in the mind of this reader.
BUCHANAN: I wouldn't say that she suffers permanently. She suffered. Hopefully, it will not return. And what had happened was she didn't know when in time she was, and she didn't know where she was. And it wasn't clear whether she recognized the people around her. So they rushed off to a hospital, but I was in a different city. I was really, really far away, so there was nothing I could do to be useful. So I was just sitting, freaking out. And I was thinking - who would I be without this person who has loved me so much if she wasn't that? - because despite the fact that she's loved me so much, there were many other things she wanted to do with her life other than be my mother. And so there were many things she could have left me for, but she didn't. And thinking that set of thoughts - thinking about what it would mean if my mother wasn't there - is one of the things that sparked the book for me. That was probably where the seed came from for the book.
SIMON: Yeah. Do you mind if I ask you a publishing industry question?
BUCHANAN: Of course.
SIMON: First novel, and it set off a bidding war. What happened? That kind of thing isn't supposed to happen these days.
BUCHANAN: Something happened that I am deeply superstitious about, which is that I was editing the sort of final, final draft of the novel to send out before publishers, and it was night time. And suddenly my vision went white, and I had this incredible pain in my face. And it turned out what had happened was that lightning had hit the barn we were staying in, and it had gone through all of the electrical boxes. And it went up through my computer and through my headphones that were plugged in, into the side of my face. And that was not great, but it did save the document 'cause I think I grounded the electricity. Anyway...
SIMON: (Laughter).
BUCHANAN: Well, all of this to say that I'm very, very superstitious about this, and I believe that the lightning gave me good luck with the book.
SIMON: Yeah (laughter).
BUCHANAN: So when we sent it out, I got - all these publishers came back. It was lightning-blessed.
SIMON: Oh, my word. I've never heard of - I've - I mean, (laughter) I've never heard a story quite like that.
BUCHANAN: So, yeah, just get hit by lightning, then you'll get a book deal (laughter).
SIMON: Rowan Hisayo Buchanan - her widely anticipated first novel, "Harmless Like You." Thanks so much for being with us.
BUCHANAN: Thank you. It was an honor to be on the show.
I Can’t Rank My Loyalties: An Interview with Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel Harmless Like You is not a comfort read. At least, for me, a woman who has yet to be married or have a child, its themes revolve around a marriage at the point of potential break and a child abandoned by his mother. Reading the novel, I couldn’t help but fear “what if I do it all wrong, too? What if motherhood and marriage are jobs some people just aren’t meant for?” Luckily, I got to right to the source of the novel’s intense themes and ask Hisayo Buchanan about these questions and more:
Kati Heng: Harmless Like You touches on the hard questions many of us without kids are most scared to ask: What if I’m not meant to be a parent? What if I’m bad at it? The novel explores this idea; but, taken from your side and not the characters: Do you believe parenthood is a choice you make, or a role that naturally suits some and not others? Does it fall somewhere in the middle?
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: To me it seems there are as many types of parents as there are types of people. You may have the talent but no desire for parenthood or vice versa. You may be a good parent in one situation and a bad one in another. I know a brilliant, energetic, sparkling writer with two children. I know children whose parents treated them terribly. I know women who for one reason or another chose not to have children and whose lives I vastly admire. For the most part, I try not tell other people how to live their lives. I am struggling enough to figure out how to live my own well.
KH: Similarly, is Marriage the same sort of choice? Is every sort of bond and family you make a daily decision?
RHB: I’m not married but I do believe human bonds are daily decisions. But they’re decisions made not by one or even two people. You decide one thing, they decide one thing, and then the world throws itself at you. There are late trains, frightening governments, viruses, and car crashes. Even good things can be a surprise—daisies growing up through the sidewalk or a free cookie. The context of your decision can change entirely based on events that neither you nor your counterpart have anything to do with.
KH: As a smaller-woman with postures and ticks that are constantly self-shrinking, I could strongly relate to Yuki’s aversion to being called “Harmless.” As a (from what I see in pictures) smaller woman yourself, do you also feel like people see you this way – harmless, little, a non-intimidating presence?
RHB: Funny, you should ask. I’m actually not that short. I’m 5’5 1/2”, which is taller than the American average. But I feel short. There’s a photo of me when I was eleven in purple velveteen leggings and a black T-shirt and super tangled hair. That’s the picture I have of myself inside. I liked being this knees and elbows kid with big hands and oversized ears. It made me feel like I could slip in and out of the world unseen. So I’m always a little surprised when people spot me.
KH: On the question above, I’ve learned to use my smallness to my advantages in many situations. Have you developed ways of using this, too? If so, can you share a few?
RHB: This isn’t really about smallness, but it is about hiding. I used to have this thing where I’d sit on top of wardrobes. It made me feel safe to be tucked into that nook so close to the ceiling. I’d bring a book up there and just curl. I also found it funny not to be noticed. I can’t do it anymore because my wardrobe has too many books on top.
KH: It’s funny how the artists Yuki hang out with and listens to discuss art / literary magazines sound so similar to conversations between artists you’d hear today. Are we stuck in a track of the same? Has dissenting art evolved since the 60s/70s type of protests?
RHB: I’m always wary of making big statements about an era or about art as a whole. Sitting inside of a moment it’s so hard to see what is changing and what isn’t. I would say that in any movement there is going to be ego, competitiveness, pretension, and people who are overlooked. Maybe that’s cynical. But despite that I love that we keep trying to make art and that we keep trying to make the world better. Yes, we fail. Yes, we’re weak. But isn’t it wonderful that we try anyway?
KH: As a woman that only seems my Italian heritage present itself in terms of body hair, I very much appreciated Yuki’s frankness about having nipple hairs. As feminists are now celebrating a return of natural pubic hair and decorating/ dying the hair in their armpits – what is it going to take to finally normalize hairy nipples?
RHB: Taboos are so interesting. We break them and then we build them back up. Leg hair is not okay, then it’s okay, then it’s not okay again. Growing up, I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what was acceptable. As a young teenager I was very unhappy. I remember thinking, I had to make myself pretty because when pretty girls were sad it was interesting. When ugly girls were sad it was just pitiful. This whole dichotomy is, of course, bullshit and dangerous. I think the ways we talk about bodies is so insidious—even the bodies of politicians I hate. Yes, they’re awful, but what about a lovely human being who happens to have small hands. How will they feel reading those words? Can we criticize ideas not bodies?
When I was writing Harmless Like You, someone asked me if Yuki was pretty. I asked them to who? There are humans whose bone structures I want to memorize, but who I know others find only meh. As a writer, I want to create characters who aren’t pretty or ugly, but who are seen and who see.
KH: The bio on your artist page includes the line “I’m British, Japanese, Chinese, and American – hyphenation and ordering vary depending on the day.” As a white American with very non-descript (and non-identifying) racial makeup, I can’t relate to this being a daily point of contention. Can you tell me a little bit about how and why the ordering changes daily?
RHB: If I meet a stranger there’s a fifty percent chance they’ll start guessing my race. So many times since being published, I’ve been asked to order my nationalities/ethnicities. Which is most important to me? Why have I said Japanese before Chinese or vice versa? These questions are usually innocent. But there is something slightly invasive about being asked. Would you ask a stranger which grandparent they loved the most? How am I supposed to provide this ranking? Genetically? My brother and I have both done DNA mapping, mine concluded that I was probably Korean. I’m not, as far as I know, even a little bit Korean. I don’t find my love for my grandfather whose bushy eyebrows sit on my face to be measurable against the hours I spent walking up and down Riverside Park in New York with my best friend reordering the universe. I can’t rank my loyalties.
KH: Finally, tell me about your bookshelves. In what rooms do you keep your books? How are they sorted? What authors or collections do you own every book of? What books are on your nightstand?
RHB: I move from place to place a lot. And my personal library is scattered between friends and family and loved ones. Inevitably the book I want is never where I am.
I do have a small collection of precious books. I have every Zadie Smith book. There are authors who I’d like to collect like Hiromi Kawakami, but who haven’t been published in English often enough for me to form a true collection. Books with inscriptions have special place in my heart. I once bought a Nicole Krauss novel from Housing Works with a whole love letter in the front. I have a small collection of signed books, which are weird. On one level, seeing the handwriting reminds you the author is human, but at the same time it makes the book all the more an object of worship. I’m looking at my signed copy of Loop of Jade by the amazing Sarah Howe and I do think it might be a little bit magic.
At the moment, by my bedside I have The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla and Good Girls Marry Doctors edited by Piyali Bhattacharya. I read them both a while ago, but they’re inspiration for a project I’m putting together.
Today, I’m reading Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Expectations, which so far is cutting me to the bone.
Harmless Like You
Arlene McKanic
BookPage.
(Mar. 2017): p17.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
HARMLESS LIKE YOU
By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Norton
$24.95, 320 pages
ISBN 9781324000747
Audio, eBook available
DEBUT FICTION
When we meet Yuki and Jay, the protagonists of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's sad, well-written debut novel, things aren't
going so well. We first see Yuki in the '60s, when she's a teenager. The daughter of expatriate Japanese parents, she is
adrift. Having spent most of her life in New York, she feels neither truly American nor Japanese. She moves in with a
schoolmate when her parents return to Japan, then bounces from one bad situation to another; she only knows she
wants to be an artist and is failing at it.
In 2016, Jay, who owns an art gallery, has just become a father. He is unprepared for fatherhood; his ancient hairless
cat is more real to him than his daughter. His own father has just died, and he has to find his father's widow, who lives
in Berlin. Yes, Jay's father's widow is Yuki. And yes, she is Jay's mother and he hasn't seen her since he was a toddler.
Buchanan's skill in bringing her characters to life is superb. Yuki joins the growing list of female protagonists who are
believable, relatable but not likable. As a teenager she is tragically gormless. The contempt shown her by her school
friend/roommate; her years of abuse from Lou, the shiftless poet manque she moves in with; and her lack of success as
an artist--these slights harden her, and she's almost as mean to her saintly husband, Edison, as Lou was to her. Finally,
the desperate Yuki leaves him and their son and flees to the city where ruined artists go to sort themselves out.
Freaked out by the twin shocks of Edison's death and first-time parenthood, Jay is still capable of a trenchant sense of
humor and perspective. He knows that leaving his wife with an infant and booking to Europe with a 17-year-old cat is
ridiculous. The reader doesn't lose hope in him.
Buchanan interrogates the ways pain is paid forward, how one generation repeats the foibles of another so inexorably
that they seem inherited through the genes. She also wants the reader to know that the messes, like so many autosomal
recessive disorders, are at least partially fixable. Harmless Like You is a lovely debut.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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McKanic, Arlene. "Harmless Like You." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 17+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701835&it=r&asid=3e55894ac74aa6c454329e4ba6a15f47.
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Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo: HARMLESS LIKE
YOU
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo HARMLESS LIKE YOU Norton (Adult Fiction) $24.95 3, 28 ISBN: 978-1-324-00074-7
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo: HARMLESS LIKE YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile,
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Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo. Harmless Like You
Shirley Quan
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p86.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo. Harmless Like You. Norton. Feb. 2017.256p. ISBN 9781324000747. $24.95; ebk. ISBN
9781324000754. F
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 pageturner
for those who appreciate stories focusing on families and relationships.--Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa
Ana, CA
Quan, Shirley
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Quan, Shirley. "Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo. Harmless Like You." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 86. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562300&it=r&asid=252d46ff3b4108e13024018817a6c3ba.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562300
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Harmless Like You
Publishers Weekly.
263.48 (Nov. 28, 2016): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Harmless Like You
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. Norton, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-324-00074-7
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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Harmless Like You." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149874&it=r&asid=9251a03e2896e9b25f30d862ffc58c19.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473149874
Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan review – a startling debut
There’s poetry and pizzazz in this unusual novel about loneliness and desertion
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan explores conflicting desires in her debut novel.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan explores conflicting desires in her debut novel. Photograph: Alamy
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Emily Rhodes
Friday 7 July 2017 10.59 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 11 July 2017 09.22 EDT
In her first novel, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan explores our conflicting desires to stay or go, and the loneliness that can arise either way. It opens with Jay, a new father, meeting his mother Yuki for the first time since she left him as a baby. In phrases such as “the sun buttered the sidewalk”, we immediately catch the unusual cadence of Buchanan’s voice, with its combination of poetry and pizzazz. She teases out the two strands of their stories: we follow Yuki from lonely misfit Japanese teenager in New York, 1968, to desperate housewife in Connecticut, 1983, as her struggle to be an artist provides the inner resilience she needs to withstand life’s buffeting; Jay’s cynical voice, doubting his love for his wife and new baby, appears in interludes. Holding his “leechling” child, Jay wonders if it is “genetic … the great desire to just let go?” “First children are like first books,” a character remarks. “You overthink them. Later, you’re more haphazard, but often better.” Perhaps the symmetry of the two storylines is a little too neat, but nevertheless this debut announces a startling talent.
Books
‘Harmless Like You,’ by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
By Fran Bigman March 6
Look at “Harmless Like You” the way you should look at art on the walls of a museum: Look until you think you’re done looking, and then look again.
(Norton)
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut is a beautifully textured novel, befitting the story of an artist and the son she abandons as a baby. The artist, Yuki, is an artist because “little things . . . abraded her mind,” a vulnerability that is both blessing and curse. We come to see those “little things” through her artist’s perspective, like a friend’s “pale eyes, the shade of lettuces fresh out of the bag.”
The composition of “Harmless Like You” is clever: It starts in 2016 with Yuki’s adult son, Jay, tracking her down, and then the story alternates between Yuki’s life in 1960s and 1970s Manhattan and Jay’s present-day life in Brooklyn.
Yuki’s story feels compellingly immediate, as prickly and unpredictable as its protagonist. She becomes a semi-successful performance artist whose works include a series of photographs of the all-white food she ate for an entire month. Her thoughts are brilliantly rendered in sentences that curl up into questions. At first, she seems as harmless as the title suggests, a little Asian girl who reminds people of the civilians getting massacred in Vietnam.
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Born in New York to Japanese parents, Yuki fits in nowhere. At 17, she stays behind when her parents return to Tokyo, and she ends up in an abusive relationship that nonetheless inspires her creatively. When it ends, she wonders, “Why was it that when a fist slammed into your face, it was a jump-start, but heartbreak was a leak in the gas tank?”
Author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (Eric Tortora Pato)
Through Yuki, the novel probes the complicated politics of victimhood. She ultimately scorns harmlessness, “as if being unable to strike back was a virtue,” leaving the stifling comforts of suburban marriage to pursue her art.
The novel successfully walks a fine line in showing how Jay is affected by his mother’s departure while not stereotyping her as a selfish woman responsible for her son’s neuroses. And Jay’s understated reunion with his mother is both powerful and believable. If his resolve to be a good father feels overly redemptive, it’s only because Buchanan has so skillfully sketched the stories of those who leave, rather than those who stay.
Fran Bigman is a visiting researcher at Keio University in Tokyo.
HARMLESS LIKE YOU
By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Norton. 308 pp. $24.95
BOOK REVIEW | FICTION
A Japanese Woman’s Life in Art, Made in the Village
By NAMARA SMITHMARCH 10, 2017
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Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Credit Eric Tortora Pato
HARMLESS LIKE YOU
By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
308 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
It’s a crisp fall day in 1968. A man in a beige fedora and grease-stained trench coat sits on a New York City stoop, eating a hot dog and singing the first lines of a Beatles song. As a female office worker walks by, he whips open his coat to reveal “the shriveled purple stump of his penis.” Down the street, Yuki, a sensitive and lonely Japanese teenager living with her parents on the edge of Greenwich Village, watches in fascination, so hungry for experience of any kind that she envies even a mildly repellent one.
This early scene sets the tone of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel, “Harmless Like You.” Though it alights briefly on a variety of themes, the book is chiefly preoccupied with the romance of New York City in the 1960s and ’70s, a place and time imagined as a bohemian paradise full of both danger and opportunity. Within 50 pages, Yuki has been befriended by a glamorous, feral blonde named Odile, who teaches her how to skip meals and glue Twiggy-style nylon eyelashes onto her bottom lids; has received her first kiss in a bar near Washington Square Park; and has persuaded her parents to let her remain in New York to pursue a career as an artist when they return to Japan.
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In the first of the novel’s two alternating strands, Yuki’s artistic and sentimental education is traced over the period from 1968 to 1983. In the second, set in the present day, the narration is taken over by her adult son, Jay, who was 2 years old when Yuki left him and his father in Connecticut and moved to Berlin to devote herself to her work. Now a new father himself, Jay has decided to meet his mother for the first time since she abandoned him.
Buchanan’s prose is lyrical and evocative, if occasionally overdone. Reflecting Yuki’s artistic sensibility, each chapter narrated from her perspective begins with a description of an exotic shade of pigment — carmine, raw umber, quinacridone gold — selected to correspond to its mood. The language in these sections is insistently color-saturated: Odile is “spearmint-eyed,” a pair of tinted sunglasses are “Tropicana orange” and “citrine-glazed,” Yuki’s bare knees in the cold are as “vermilion as the Red Delicious apples that sat in the kitchen uneaten.” The effect is like looking at the past through a series of Instagram filters, with even mundane scenes bathed in a romantic glow.
Yuki remains indistinct through this nostalgic haze, overwhelmed by the meticulously styled tableaux constructed around her. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s Jay, at first seemingly a secondary character, who emerges as the book’s strongest presence. A dealer in Asian and Asian-American art, a business “blossoming in the wary, post-recession years” as his rich clients seek safe investments, he’s a cheerfully opportunistic denizen of Manhattan’s mercenary art world, networking furiously and bragging about his ability to “evaluate the wealth of a woman from the health of her nail beds and the state of her split ends.”
But Buchanan also lends Jay an endearingly off-kilter charm (he fusses over Celeste, his hairless cat, rubbing moisturizer into her skin and dressing her in black, blue and “festive” turtleneck sweaters), and makes it clear that he has a sharp eye for the self-deceptions of the artists he manages. His voice is sour, unsentimental and often extremely funny, and the contrast between his cynical milieu, in which individual identity and artistic creation are marketable commodities, and Yuki’s ecstatic search for self-actualization gives the novel an edge it might otherwise lack. After all, Buchanan reminds us, the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today.
The Color of Art: On Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Debut
By Ilana Masad
57 0 1
FEBRUARY 28, 2017
COLORS ARE EVOCATIVE. Take the mood ring, the classic 1970s junior high school ornament that ostensibly tracks the wearer’s emotional state but really only reacts to body temperature. Blue, on a mood ring, is “normal”; dark brown or black equals “fear” or “stress”; purple can mean “calm,” “cool,” or “very happy,” depending on the shade. None of this is proven to be true, but the rings are still sold at various knick-knack stores, which speaks to the power of association.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan uses a similar technique to assess the moods of Yuki’s chapters in her debut novel Harmless Like You, but her colors are those of an artist. The header of “Quinacridone Gold,” the first chapter, reads: “A toasted yellow formulated for the automobile industry. It is the colour of streetlights on puddles at night, pickled yellow radish and duck beaks.” The colors’ descriptions, always rich in detail, may be unfamiliar to those of us who are not visual artists or students of hue, but the descriptions, which provide comparisons both concrete and abstract, make them significant to any reader.
At the beginning of the novel, it is 1968, and Yuki is 16 and living in New York. She is lonely, existentially so — she rarely thinks of or acknowledges it and ultimately both craves and embraces it. If Yuki herself had a color, it would be something opaque and sturdy, perhaps burnished sugi wood or the crusted blood-rust of New York brownstone bricks. There is something old-souled about her, even as she stumbles through the motions of adolescence. She is a detached observer in the midst of her own experiences, unable to fully connect with them. The daughter of Japanese parents — her father remembers the American internment camps and hates the United States as a result, while her mother attempts to make cheeseburgers with cottage cheese — Yuki is nonetheless thoroughly American, confused as to why a language would have four ways to introduce oneself according to the decorum of the situation. Japan is as unreal and abstract to her as the possibility of finding fashionable shoes that fit her size-four feet.
From the start, however, we know that Yuki will find connection of a sort, for she has a son and a husband, both estranged — this is laid out for us in the prologue, narrated by Jay, the son. He is the other main character of the book, which alternates between the third-person telling of Yuki’s story and Jay’s first-person narration. The tones of their chapters are vastly different, proving Buchanan’s versatility as a writer in her ability to both maintain distance from and be intimate with her characters. While Yuki remains somewhat mysterious, both to us and seemingly to herself, Jay is concrete, often painfully self-aware of his own shortcomings, which are many.
Jay’s chapters begin almost 50 years after Yuki’s. His father, Yuki’s husband, has just died in a car accident, only three months after the birth of Jay’s daughter Eliot. It was on the way to visit Eliot that the accident occurred, and Jay’s irritability toward his daughter, with whom he already didn’t feel the connection expected of a new parent, only worsens, perhaps because she inadvertently caused his father’s death. Tensions between Jay and his wife are high, and we quickly come to recognize that he is not the most sympathetic of characters, but this doesn’t matter. Few people in Harmless Like You are particularly likeable, which is another strength of the book; the novel’s inhabitants are still entirely relatable, their motives and methods so natural and understandable that even when entirely unexpected, readers are unlikely to avoid emotionally connecting with them.
While Jay takes up a significant portion of the novel, Yuki is its driving force. Jay knows who she is, in the age of Google, and so finds that she is a moderately successful artist living in Berlin. When his father’s last will and testament instructs that Yuki should receive the big Connecticut house that Jay grew up in, he decides to travel to Berlin — taking his hairless therapy cat, Celeste, who has been with him since he was a teenager. In delivering the papers requiring signatures, Jay finally gets to meet her.
How did Yuki arrive in Berlin? This is what her story builds up to, subtly exposing Yuki’s psychology. The impending move to Japan when she is 16 and a chance encounter with a gum-chewing blonde are what changes everything for Yuki. The self-named Odile is the unintentional savior. She and Yuki meet on the fire escape of their school building, where they’ve both skipped lunch, Yuki because she spent her lunch money on a pair of sunglasses, Odile because she doesn’t eat. They become fast friends, of the kind essential to adolescence, their relationship based on a willingness to take risks together rather than on interests or traits they have in common. Odile introduces Yuki to a lifestyle heretofore impossible for the latter girl to imagine: they starve together, meet men together, drink together, and dress together. And, finally, they live together, as Yuki convinces her parents to leave her in the United States to finish school and go to college here while they return to Japan.
Asking to be left behind is a curious request. On the one hand, it’s a classic teenage desire: independence from parents, freedom to live as an adult. But on the other, it’s hard to contemplate as a reality unless one’s parents are terrible or difficult in ways that Yuki’s are not. They are strict, but not bad parents, and it’s clear that they love her. Still, they agree to let her stay when she convinces them that she can live with Odile and her mother, Lillian, a bohemian writer who decides that she’s happy having Yuki around because she always wanted more kids: “First children are like first books. You imagine they’re a splinter of your soul. You overthink them. Later, you’re more haphazard, but often better.” (An astute observation from a debut novelist.)
Yuki’s move is an attempt to become more like Odile. She wants to fit in, to be sexy, to be blonder — in other words, whiter. This is the subtle message woven into Yuki’s first friendship, one that continues to thrive on Yuki’s envy and Odile’s need to have a sidekick more than actual pleasure in each other’s company. It is a hard, sometimes harsh, friendship, especially after Odile is raped by a photographer she and Yuki meet while hanging out at a park. Odile blames Yuki for not knowing about the rape, for letting it happen, as if she pushed Odile out the door, but Yuki never sits with this guilt. Guilt, in fact, is something Yuki never externally shows. As time passes and both she and Odile leave school, Yuki begins to fall for Lillian’s boyfriend, a sports journalist and secret poet named Lou. It is bad manners to fall for your host’s boyfriend’s advances, but Lou does something no one has ever done for Yuki before. He takes her to an art museum, and it is that more than anything else that leads to Yuki falling for him.
Though Yuki and Odile skipped school often, Yuki still attended art classes on Fridays because “[l]ight and shadow required no translation, and while drawing she forgot herself in the whisper of charcoal on paper.” As a girl who is always both visible and invisible — being Japanese and small and female means she is by turns exoticized or ignored, as marginalized people often are — Yuki forgets herself only when she is being the purposeful observer, creating art. So when Lou takes her to the Whitney, where Yuki first sees art that is abstract and performative and modern, she is moved to tears, expressing emotion that we haven’t yet seen from her. Art moves her in a way that means she can only be a true artist — which doesn’t equal being a good artist, but rather a person who can’t live without the presence of it in her life.
Even when Yuki quits school and moves out of Lillian’s apartment — decisions of an adult responsible for her actions — she remains in some respects a naïve little girl, accepting things that happen without much worry as to what will become of her. It is not surprising that Lou becomes abusive, since Yuki had heard and seen him hit Lillian before her, but Buchanan effectively shows how easily acceptable it can become to the abused person within the relationship. Even after meeting a young architect, Edison, who supports her art more than Lou ever could, Yuki doesn’t leave.
It’s hard to describe art well in fiction, but the concepts Buchanan gives Yuki to work with are both brilliant and brilliantly gimmicky, a nod to the fact that Yuki isn’t necessarily the artist she strives to be, but also that, more importantly, she is a working artist, taking risks in order to attempt to pass along ideas and trying them out even if they fail. The first show she puts up is a little on the nose, but as it’s being put together by a 21-year-old, this is more than forgivable. In a series of photographs, Yuki presents girls, all the girls she isn’t and hasn’t been — it’s hard to imagine her ever being as carefree as any of them:
The Upper East Side schoolgirls wore boaters and neat maid-tied braids. But coming home at the end of the day, they were as frayed and excitable as little girls anywhere. The Puerto Rican girls had their ears pierced, and she caught the glimpse of gold between the curls. Little girls played jump rope hopscotch in Harlem, a game that involved skipping while having to hit your foot in just the right square. The Irish girls, in their Sunday dresses, concealed silver jacks in their fists.
All these girls have something that Yuki has never had, and perhaps never will. In the final picture of the series is an American darling–type girl with ringlets and big eyes, holding the newspaper with the famous picture of the “Napalm Girl” on it. The series is called “Harmless Like You,” an echo of something Lou once said about “harmless little girls like” Yuki being killed in the Vietnam War. The ignorance of his comment — Yuki is Japanese, not Vietnamese — unintentionally spurred Yuki into creating this series of racially diverse girls, with the whitest of them holding the atrocious image of pain and fear.
Many years later, when Jay visits her in Germany, we get another glimpse of Yuki’s art. This time, there is a series of photographs of white foods on white plates, the only food that Yuki ate for a period of time. The show’s title is “Shit’s Still Brown.” The message may be crude, but it’s also deeply affecting and speaks to the quiet preoccupation Yuki has with race, both her own and that which she yearned to be in order to fit in. Buchanan doesn’t make this the main driving issue of the novel, but it is nevertheless important, especially as Americans in particular tend to think of Asians as “almost white,” as the “token minority,” and lump them together as all being from the same vast place, Asia, as if that is a signifier of some shared monolithic culture.
Jay, half-Japanese and half-white via his father, understands that this is not so, even though his Japanese mother wasn’t in the picture since he was quite small. Mimi, the woman he married, is also biracial, white and Chinese, and people in college, where they met, commented on how similar they looked. Even they think they look alike, something about their halfness bringing their features closer together than if they were all white, Japanese, or Chinese. Their relationship is portrayed as having been perfect until the impending parenthood, at which point they began to fight, Jay resentful of the child taking his wife’s attention, Mimi angry at Jay’s detachment. But there’s a clear reason for Jay’s inability to connect to even the idea of his daughter, much less to the squirming bundle of humanity suddenly thrust into his life. The abandonment by his mother hit him hard, but when we’re given access to Yuki’s moment of disappearance, we see that it was far from the kind of leave-taking he’s imagined it to be. There is kindness along with selfishness in Yuki’s choice.
Looking at the book as a whole, there 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 — she was 27 when the novel came out in the United Kingdom, younger when she wrote it. Buchanan must be, like Yuki herself, an old soul. But unlike Yuki, there is no doubt about how good an artist she is, for this book demonstrates that she is an excellent one.