"A semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with...

'"This brilliant debut novel by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is cause for celebration."--Lorrie Moore. Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Berlin, and Connecticut, 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 the mother who abandoned him when he was only two years old. The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen...

In 1950s California, grieving Mildred Clausen tries to have her son, who was killed in World War II, cloned but instead, a Japanese man emerges and her niece, Ella Mae, befriends him, in spite of the town's intense prejudice and her aunt's conviction that he is her son's killer.