I’ve never been to Tokyo, but sometimes I wonder: why bother with the plane ticket? The imagined Tokyo is more real than the actual city. For westerners, it is a place whose USP is its unreality: its irreducible strangeness, its intense Japaneseness. It’s a city where lonely souls go to bump against other lonely souls and everything is lost in translation. To spoil this fantasy with too much daylight would be to miss the point.
On the surface, Bryan Washington’s Palaver isn’t in a hurry to push against these clichés. It follows an estranged mother and son who meet again in Japan many years after he has left the humidity and homophobia of Texas. He spends his days tutoring English and cruising bars, entangled in a messy affair with a married man; she interrupts this existence, impulsively flying to see him when she hears an unfamiliar catch in his voice over the phone.
The author is one of America’s most lauded young novelists and his first two books, Memorial and Family Meal, were humdingers. Still and quiet on the surface, they dealt in small-scale domestic lives. I loved both, but I struggled initially with Palaver. The story takes time to stretch its legs, and the vision of Japan seemed nicked from a Lonely Planet guide. In the son’s first few months in Tokyo, he is ‘awed by the size and speed of everything. Everyone only wore black.’
Yet, like the mother and son’s deepening relationship, the novel grows in complexity. The mother falls in with a local café owner, who opens the city up to her away from her son’s eyes; the son, meanwhile, comes to realise what Tokyo means to him, rather than just what it was an escape from.
The writing is delicate and elegant throughout. Yes, sometimes characters speak as though they’d stepped from a creative writing workshop: ‘It had to be an accident. An accident of beauty. ‘But when Washington loosens up and cracks the odd joke, the sentences really start to thrum.
Still, I’m not sure I’d recommend Palaver as the place to start. Try Family Meal instead. The novelty of the setting adds too much stiffness, which, because the story leans on character rather than plot, needs to feel comfortable and lived in. But if you fancy an exotic winter break, you could do far worse: at least, you’ll save yourself £700 on the air fare.
AloJapan.com