Asian American Literature Fans

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Let’s employ B&N’s editorial description to get things started: “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?”

Well, this novel was definitely a tough read for me. On the one hand, the novel is beautifully written, with complex representations of the main characters. I agree with the phrase that the prose is “startlingly beautiful,” but one of the issues that does come up is the rather bleak fictional world. Buchanan does employ an interesting alternating first and third person perspectives that are set decades apart. This technique provides the novel with a measure of momentum because we’re left wondering how these two perspectives are connected. The third person perspective is given to Yuki Oyama, and we see the challenge of her growing up in New York City. It’s pretty clear that she’s desperate to retain her American identity, so much so that she makes a tentative friendship with a fellow teen named Odile. This friendship provides her with an opportunity to stay in New York City, especially when her father and mother move back to Japan. Indeed, Odile, and her mother Lillian, offer her the opportunity to live with them. Of course, Yuki has to adapt to this very different lifestyle, which includes having to witness the physical abuse that occurs between Lillian and her boyfriend, Lou, as well as their distinctly American existence. Yuki’s determination to remain in America leads her to take a post with The Paper, a job that opens up for her through the networking introduction offered by Lou, who is a journalist. Ultimately, we should not be too surprised that Yuki eventually falls in love with Lou, and they engage in their own ill-fated romance.

In the more contemporary first person narration, from the perspective of a mixed-race character named Jay, we are offered a completely different view of an American life. Here, Jay is involved in the art world, working on exhibitions and lining up new, exciting cultural producers. Jay’s life is complicated when his wife Mimi becomes pregnant. His passion for his marriage seems to be waning, which leads him to engage in an affair. At the same time, we begin to discover the connection between the two time periods and the perspectives. Jay is Yuki’s estranged son, and he needs to get a signature from her in order to complete a document-based issue related to his deceased father and Yuki’s former husband. Eventually, and here I’ll be providing spoilers, we discover that Yuki’s relationship with Lou ends, and Yuki finds herself falling into the arms of another man, an architect by the name of Edison. Edison is blindly in love with Yuki and offers to marry her, even though Yuki doesn’t return those feelings. But, Yuki’s in a very difficult position; she’s just been thrown out of Lou’s, her prospects in terms of her career are limited, and she’s still tarrying with a desire to create art that has become ever more important to her. Edison’s offer of marriage seems to be a lifeboat, but we soon begin to see that the marriage that follows constrains Yuki even further. She doesn’t want to be a housewife, she fails to create art, and falls into an incredible depression. Yuki eventually becomes pregnant, and their child is named Jay. Thus, we come to find out the explicit connection between those perspectives.

The conclusion of the novel sees Jay traveling to Germany, where Yuki is now living. This ending is where Buchanan’s work shines the most, because she doesn’t give us the kind of standard rapprochement that we might expect. Instead, there is a subtlety to their interactions that shows us a desire to connect, but also a real understanding that the gulf between them cannot be repaired by one engagement. Also, given the rather distant effect offered by the third person narration for much of the novel, something of Jay’s perspective enables us to see Yuki with a little bit more sympathy by the final pages. So many of the characters seem so incredibly unhappy and frustrated by their lives that we’re desperate for this elegant levity; it’s unfortunate that it comes so late. In some ways, my reading experience is reminiscent of the one I had while reading Jun Yun’s Shelter. Traveling through a fictional world filled with such dreary plots becomes emotionally draining, and you come out of the work exhausted.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu