Memorial by Bryan Washington

Published 2020 · 336 pages · 73,271 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction

How hard is Memorial to read?

Memorial scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
Washington writes in a deliberately spare, colloquial idiom—Houston neighborhood names, food terms (katsu, kombu, sopa de pescado), and casual profanity carry the texture, but no specialized terminology or archaic diction impedes any reader. Occasional Japanese words appear without translation, creating mild friction but never obscurity. The vocabulary sits closer to contemporary literary fiction than to challenging modernist prose.
Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
Sentences are short, declarative, and often staccato—frequently just two or three clauses. Washington favors fragments and bullet-style enumeration ('We haven't been to a party in months') over subordinate nesting. The prose reads fast, more like Carver or Offill than James or Faulkner, and its syntactic demands are minimal.
Abstraction: 38 out of 100
The novel stays grounded in the concrete—specific Houston streets, meals, workplace scenes, sexual encounters—and its philosophical content emerges through action and dialogue rather than essayistic digression. Mitsuko's dinner-table monologue about Eiju and the recurring 'favorite things' lists gesture toward abstraction, but the book never leaves observable reality for long. The register is closer to Remains of the Day's emotional implication than to Godot's existential abstraction.
Information density: 42 out of 100
The short, numbered sections pack narrative quickly without annotation or footnote; readers absorb two households, two cities, and two dying relationships in a compressed space. Yet individual scenes are spacious and deliberately paced, rarely overwhelming with data. The interleaved structure—Benson in Houston, Mike in Osaka—requires readers to track two simultaneous timelines but keeps each strand clear.
Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
The novel's emotional logic is almost entirely submerged. Benson's infidelity, Mike's reasons for leaving, and whether the couple will reconcile are never stated outright—readers must infer from charged silences, deflected dialogue, and oblique scene selections. The 'We've been fine. Thank you for asking.' break exemplifies Washington's strategy of acknowledging information while refusing to deliver it. This requires more active assembly than Carver but less than Pedro Paramo.
Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
The title's double meaning—a Houston park where ashes are scattered, and the act of keeping the dead in memory—provides the book's central resonance. Eiju's lists of favorite things function as material monuments to a man refusing to be eulogized. Food recurs as the primary vehicle for care and intimacy. These symbols are legible and reinforced rather than buried, operating more like Ishiguro's surface-beneath-surface than Woolf's lighthouse.
Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
Washington writes with sincerity; there is no sustained gap between what characters say and what the author endorses. Occasional deadpan—Benson noting the restaurant's atmosphere is 'entirely too festive for our mood'—provides light tonal irony, but the emotional stakes are played straight. The novel neither satirizes nor undercuts its protagonists, landing well below the Lolita-style unreliable-narrator irony.
Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
The novel ends without confirming whether Benson and Mike stay together; the final image of Mitsuko ascending the airport escalator resolves the visit but not the relationship. Key backstory (exactly what Mike did to betray Benson, whether Benson acts on Omar's kiss) is withheld or implied rather than dramatized. The ambiguity is purposeful but not maximalist—closer to Normal People's deliberately open closure than to 2666's structural refusal.
Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
The novel alternates POVs between Benson (Houston) and Mike (Osaka) in numbered short chapters, with both timelines running simultaneously. Intercut with the narrative chapters are Eiju's lists—favorite things, sounds, smells—that function as lyric interruptions rather than conventional scenes. This dual-strand, mosaic structure requires readers to hold two geographies and emotional registers simultaneously, though the chronology is linear within each strand.

How Memorial is regarded

Memorial holds a literary regard score of 35 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Memorial sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (135 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Memorial scores 68 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
Mike’s taking off for Osaka, but his mother’s flying into Houston.
Symbol: Formal
Whole swathes of Houston look like chunks of other countries.
Mythos: Irony iv (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
I think we ride it out, he says.
Genre: Novel + Confession
After a week in Osaka, I came up with something like a routine: I’d make it out of the apartment around eight in the evening, to prep Eiju’s bar.

Where the story of Memorial takes place

  • Houston, Third Ward and environs, c. 2018-2019 (2018 to 2019), the main setting
  • Houston and Bellaire childhoods of Mike and Benson, 1990s-2000s (1993 to 2005)
  • Osaka (Tennoji), Eiju's bar and apartment, c. 2018-2019 (2018 to 2019)

5 things that are true of Memorial, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens with Mike announcing he is flying to Osaka just as his mother is flying into Houston.

    Mike’s taking off for Osaka, but his mother’s flying into Houston.

  2. Mike announces his father's death in a voicemail, something he never normally leaves.

    He says, We’re cremating him tomorrow.

  3. Mike's dying father named his Osaka bar after Mitsuko, Mike's mother.

    You heard me, said Eiju. Mitsuko.

  4. Mitsuko tells Benson that Mike took eleven years to learn to tie his shoes.

    It took Michael eleven years, says Mitsuko.

  5. Eiju's ashes are scattered from a bridge over a Houston bayou.

    she takes the urn and she opens it and the ashes fly right out of there.

Scenes in Memorial that Frye would name

26 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
One night, I woke up for a piss, and I heard the silence. Eiju dies in his sleep, the book's central death.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Dad told me how we were supposed to follow him to Japan, says Mike, wiping at his eyes. That’s why he left. Mike overturns the family myth of Eiju's abandonment and forces Mitsuko to face her part.
Epos, untitled
Look, she says, once the drink is across from her. Did I ever tell you about my first date with Eiju? Mitsuko tells her origin story aloud in the Tex-Mex restaurant, an oral recital to listeners.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I thought he’d hug me or grab my arm or punch me in the face, but none of that happened. Mike and Eiju recognize each other on the stairs after sixteen years, the pivot of the Osaka quest.
Cognitio, untitled
I’m telling you now, said Eiju, looking my way. The moment is now. Eiju explains why he left and discloses his shared decision with Mitsuko, restoring a father-son bond.
Pathos, untitled
I lay down beside him and put my hand on his chest. Mike keeps vigil beside the body as the sacrificial scene's quiet completion.

Books that share these scenes with Memorial

About the author

Bryan Washington