A woman who abandons her husband and infant son to pursue her art makes for an easy villain. From a distance, it’s hard to see her choice as anything other than selfish. Yet in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel, Harmless Like You, Buchanan writes of such a character from a place of warm sympathy. Combining this sympathy with prose keen on glittering detail, Buchanan traces the arc of a person’s life up to such a fateful decision and presents the abandonment as collateral damage from one’s pursuit of identity.
Yuki’s story takes place in the New York of the ’60s and ’70s, a place brimming with the possibility of either disaster or glory.
Rather than deliberate over the abandonment and its aftermath, Buchanan winds her book through two disparate stories: that of the mother, Yuki, as a young, aspiring artist in New York, and that of her son Jay after his father’s death. Neither thread sculpts Yuki into a matriarch. In her youth, she hardly ever discusses a future family. In Jay’s sections, she is an absence. Though in search of his mother, he writes mostly about his marital problems, his job, his father’s death, and his own fatherhood.
Yuki’s story takes place in the New York of the ’60s and ’70s, a place brimming with the possibility of either disaster or glory. As an immigrant from Japan, Yuki is a misfit in both her native and adopted culture. She follows Japanese custom and offers food for her ancestors at an altar, but the foods she provides are decidedly American: “corned beef hash, chicken potpie, sugar cookies, and French fries.” Lonely at school, she makes one friend, Odile, right before her parents decide to return to Japan, and she convinces them to let her stay in New York and live with Odile, ostensibly to finish her studies.
A waifish girl with an inattentive mother, Odile teaches Yuki the ways of a New York street urchin. Inspired at first, their friendship schisms once Odile’s beauty leads to more than nightly shenanigans. Free from her family and abandoned by Odile, Yuki becomes easy prey for Odile’s mother’s boyfriend, Lou, a man whose craven entitlement, misogyny, and mediocrity bring to mind the alt-right Twitter eggs of today.
A bad student who can see the white of someone’s skin as the “white of icing sugar,” Yuki is drawn to the arts. She takes art classes, seeks places to display her art, and generally pursues her passion with a beguiling sincerity. At Lou’s suggestion, she neglects her regular schooling to work as a secretary at the office where he is a miserable sports reporter. Odile moves to Europe to model, and Yuki, abandoned and ensnared in Lou’s web, moves in with him. While living with him, she strikes up a friendship with an acquaintance from one of her and Odile’s escapades, Edison. A young, stable architect, he is as blandly kind as Lou is vicious.
Besides fabricating an intensely visual world, Buchanan’s adept descriptions present Yuki’s consciousness as one flooded with color and light and lines. It’s not just pretty writing, it’s the mind of an artist.
Edison and Lou are flat foils for one another. Lou abuses her both psychologically and physically. He treats her like a child for his pleasure, and he punishes her when she asserts otherwise. Meanwhile Edison praises her with a banal enthusiasm that suggests he sees her less than he loves her. In a reversal of the sexes, the men are static and one-dimensional while it is the woman artist whose life plays out through a tumultuous and fascinating psyche. Edison and Lou are only interesting because of how Yuki relates to them. She submits to them and struggles against them, and through this she begins to define herself.
Though more fleshed out than either Edison or Lou, Jay never becomes as enthralling as his mother. Centered around his half-hearted search for Yuki, his story is an addendum to her own. While her story is never just a lead-up to that abandonment, his sections feel like little more than a lead-up to their meeting.
Filtered through her keen eye, Yuki’s story entrances with visuals. For Yuki, colors are never simply themselves. A half-glanced penis is “a pink hunk of flesh like a quarter-pound of salmon.” A baby’s poop runs the spectrum from “rotten-lemon yellow to motor oil black.” Cigarettes are “pink-tipped,” and toenails are “taxicab yellow.” Besides fabricating an intensely visual world, Buchanan’s adept descriptions present Yuki’s consciousness as one flooded with color and light and lines. It’s not just pretty writing, it’s the mind of an artist.
Buchanan captivates us with her protagonist. In writing such a character, she has produced an absorbing tale of one woman’s lurch toward a fractured and wounded self to call her own.
Buchanan has Yuki’s vivid descriptors impose themselves on the people around her. We see Lou, Edison, and Odile as Yuki sees them. Jay becomes “a wound, raw and pink.” Outside her gaze, Jay is a somewhat uninspiring person, within it he is a fascinating cartoon. Though Yuki is a young, small girl whose nationality Lou can erase with one false comparison to the little Vietnamese girls he considers harmless, she is the subject and they — Lou, Edison, her family, Odile — are the objects she unwittingly sculpts.
More than her actions, it is Yuki’s morphing sight that affects others. When she describes Lou’s penis as a quarter-pound of salmon, she degrades him. When she compares Edison’s skin to sugar, she makes him as saccharine as frosting. When she considers her son a wound, she reduces him to the pain he’s caused her. Besides displaying Yuki’s artistic sensibilities, these descriptors allow her to alter those around her. Despite Yuki’s noteworthy actions, Buchanan turns Yuki’s eyes, her way of seeing, into her greatest weapon and the strongest assertion of herself.
The title of Harmless Like You comes from one of Yuki’s art series, inspired by Lou’s comparisons to the Vietnamese girls. Perhaps confusing personhood with the ability to do harm, she determinedly proves her skill at it. Through her treatment of Edison and her abandonment of her family, she shows how harmful she can be, and thus establishes her personhood. She is not, as Lou thinks, a body on which to inflict pain. She is not, as Edison imagines, the ideal matriarch bursting with talent. She is not, like Odile, an object of beauty to be caught in someone’s camera. She is the camera, and she is a person, damaged and damaging, who wreaks havoc through her life. By crafting a vivid and frenetic consciousness that subjugates others to her perspective, Buchanan captivates us with her protagonist. In writing such a character, she has produced an absorbing tale of one woman’s lurch toward a fractured and wounded self to call her own.
‘Harmless Like You’ Shows the Damage One Does to Become a Person was originally published in DrunkenBoat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.