Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is a Japanese-British-Chinese-American writer. Her writing has appeared in, among other places, NPR’s Selected Shorts, TriQuarterly, the Tin House (Open Bar) and the Indiana Review. A 2015 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop, Buchanan has lived in London, New York, Tokyo, Madison and Norwich.

Harmless Like You

Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships and familial bonds. It asks, and ultimately answers the question, “how does a mother desert her son?” Yuki Oyama is a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, while her son is forced to confront the mother who abandoned 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 behind. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki’s life is unmoored.