Credit: C Dailey Hubbard / Big Think
Key Takeaways
- Bryan Washington uses fiction to explore how identity is shaped by the subtle interactions between people, places, and languages.
- His latest novel, Palaver, continues his ongoing examination of estrangement and belonging while leaning more deliberately toward hope.
- Writing serves as Washington’s method for interrogating questions that resist easy answers.
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Bryan Washington’s characters reveal themselves through what they don’t, won’t, or can’t say as much as the utterances they give voice to. Though he constructs his stories from the first-person perspective, his protagonists never exist in heroic isolation. Each is shaped — in ways small and large, superficial and profound, knowingly and unknowingly — by the people they interact with and the cultures they inhabit.
Most of Washington’s stories are set in Houston, where he grew up, or Japan, where he currently lives. Occasionally, as in Palaver, the author’s third novel, the two collide. A finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, Palaver tells the story of an unnamed son who moved from Texas to Tokyo to escape his homophobic brother, only to receive a surprise visit from his unnamed mother more than a decade later. Like much of Washington’s previous literary work, Palaver deals with themes of estrangement, loneliness, and forgiveness.
Unlike those works, as a review from the Washington Post points out, the novel errs on the side of hope. It “deconstructs the myriad ways we intentionally or unintentionally tear people apart, but it also eloquently illuminates the tiny steps we can take to lift each other up and make ourselves whole again.”
For Washington, writing is not simply a creative endeavor. It’s a way to work through questions that can’t be answered easily. How does moving to the other side of the globe change the way you see yourself? To what extent does learning a different language transform you? Why do inconspicuous interactions prove life-changing only in hindsight? All questions Washington wrestled with while writing Palaver.
For this interview with Big Think, the author reentered the ring for another round.
Big Think: Where did the idea of Palaver come from?
Washington: For many years, I was splitting time between Houston and Osaka, but I always wanted to try living in Tokyo. The first neighborhood I spent time in is called Shin-Ōkubo. It’s the Koreatown, or one of the Koreatowns, of the greater Tokyo area. It’s deeply cosmopolitan, an ethnically and culinarily diverse juncture connecting different parts of the city to one another. I was curious what a narrative set in this particular neighborhood — in a city and a country that has been deeply influenced by the rest of the world and is still in the midst of having a conversation with itself about what that means — would look like.
Big Think: Do you think you have gotten to know the neighborhood better by writing about it?
Washington: There are as many ways to experience a city as there are people residing in it. Even that might be too limiting a way to put it, because we change as we spend time in a place. The way I first experienced Shin-Ōkubo in 2015 is quite different from the way I experience it now.
It’s difficult for me to write about a place if I haven’t spent a notable amount of time there. Also, spending time in a place knowing I’m going to write about it differs from time spent simply living my daily life. Writing affects how I experience even relatively mundane tasks: going to a convenience store, getting on the train, waiting at a traffic light, having a brief encounter that might otherwise be innocuous. I’m more grounded in the rhythms of conversation and the context of the environment in which an interaction is taking place.
Big Think: The experience of moving to a different country and immersing yourself in another culture can influence how someone defines their identity. In Japan, do you find that your sense of self has expanded or shrunk?
Washington: In some ways, I wrote Palaver because I didn’t know the answer to that question. It was only through writing that I could begin to — if not necessarily find an answer — at least reach a starting point for beginning the conversation with myself.
Growing up in Houston was pivotal in my being able to spend time outside of the U.S. without experiencing a deep feeling of dislocation. Growing up in a place where difference is the norm was essential to entering a place like Japan — or, more specifically, Osaka — where I was coded as different, certainly at first glance.
Big Think: No two languages are alike. Each offers unique ways to express oneself. Has moving between English and Japanese influenced your writing?
Washington: This is another question I explored while working on the book. Growing up in a city where English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Tagalog were spoken alongside one another attuned me to the significance not only of the information language conveys at a literal level, but also the context in which it is conveyed.
When I first began spending time in Japan, I had some foundational familiarity with the language. Though I’m not fluent, the ability to communicate directly with people had a significant impact on my experience here (as I suspect it would anywhere else). The Japanese language is heavily based on the context and imbued with inference, placing equal significance on what is and isn’t said.
People quickly develop an implicit understanding of the languages they speak. We don’t have to think about them; they move in the background. But when you are new to a language, or new to a context in which a language is spoken, you cannot help but pay attention to things that, to a native speaker, have become mundane [and] go unnoticed.
These clashes — between the unspoken and the spoken, between the seemingly mundane and immediately significant — are all narratively interesting to me, particularly as they shift across time, like when something perceived innocuously is revealed, or realized, to have been of the utmost importance in an interaction.
Big Think: Referring to Japan, you once wrote that “the island lived in my imagination the way it does for gaijin [foreigners] all over the world.” How has reality compared to your imagination?
Washington: I’m fortunate to still have that curiosity about this place and its communities. Writing Palaver, I tried to figure out why that is the case, [and] putting that into language proved tricky, whether among friends or on the page, in part because it led to other questions. What is attachment? What is connection? What is necessary for both?
I think that spending time in a particular place not only reveals what makes that place what it is, but also how its infrastructure impacts your personal experience and the experiences of those around you. Think of the way New York is viewed by someone who’s only spent time in South Dakota, or, in my case, how Tokyo is viewed by someone who was brought up in Houston.
The main thing that remains interesting to me is the tension between the idea or image of a place and the real-time experience of that place, because this is a relationship in and of itself. Actually, it’s one of the more significant relationships we have in our lives: the relationship between person and place, any place. It’s imperfect. It relies on the constant navigation and re-navigation of what we’re willing to accept, what we’re not willing to accept, what we know, and what we do not know.
Big Think: A lot of your writing draws inspiration from real-life, personal experience. Do these experiences constitute ready-to-use construction material, or do you have to process them before they can be assembled into a work of fiction?
Washington: I haven’t written autofiction in a planned, structured fashion. And while many of my protagonists code similarly to me, I don’t currently have an interest in crafting a more autobiographical narrative, whether from explicitly or implicitly lived experience.
Something that translates — or attempts to translate — from actuality to narrative is an emotional experience: the way something may have made me feel in life. The question I navigate in edits is: How am I making the reader feel in this moment?
In all the many different mediums I’ve worked in — on the page, in a newsroom, in Hollywood — this question is not asked often, yet it is one of the most important as it touches on narrative’s power to shift feeling and understanding.
More often than not, moments of epiphany occur in the midst of an innocuous undertaking — waiting for a train, at the doctor’s office, drinking coffee. They come rarely, so attempting to align components of lived experience with narrative experience over 70,000 words — where over a week or a few days of reading, the reader can experience many epiphanies that in life might take years to arrive — remains a constant goal. It’s not about translating life directly into narrative but projecting an iteration of life and its progressions onto narrative.
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