Jackson Alone
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 6, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Four Black Japanese gay men team up against a culture where discrimination is deep-seated and revenge is just a click away. A searing, darkly funny debut from the Akutagawa Prize–winning author.
Nobody at the corporate offices of Athletius Japan knows much about the massage therapist Jackson—but rumors abound. He used to work as a model. He likes to party. He’s mixed race—half-Japanese, half-somewhere-in-Africa-n. He might be gay. Fueling the gossip is the sudden appearance of a violent pornographic video featuring a man who looks a lot like Jackson.
When Jackson serendipitously meets three other queer mixed-race guys, he learns he’s not the only one being targeted. Together they concoct a plan: find out who’s responsible and, in the meantime, switch identities and play tricks on people—a boyfriend, a boss—who’ve wronged them, exploiting the fact that nobody can seem to tell them apart.
A short, blistering gut punch of a novel, Jackson Alone is at turns satirical and deadpan, angry and tender—a frank exploration of identity, race, queerness, and discrimination in contemporary Japan that announces Jose Ando as a singular new talent in the global literary scene.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ando tackles colorism in Japanese society in his bold but unfocused debut thriller. Jackson, a gay, half-Black massage therapist at the offices of a Tokyo athletic brand, courts controversy at work one afternoon when his colleagues discover that his shirt, whose origins he can't recall, has a QR code embedded in its design. The code links to a violent pornographic video that appears to feature Jackson, though he denies it's him and has no memory of the act. After three other gay, half-Black Japanese men—drag queen Jerin, porn star Ikiru, and aspiring reality show contestant X—get tangled in the fallout from the video, all four hatch a plot to track down their assailant and uncover the circumstances around the video's creation. Along the way, the men begin to switch places with one another to exact petty revenge against dismissive romantic partners and slimy colleagues. Ando fumbles his strong premise with some preposterous deus ex machina in the novel's home stretch, and his core cast remain little more than ciphers. Still, it's hard not to admire the author's passionate rebuke of Japanese conformity or his tender depiction of queer camaraderie. There's sufficient evidence on offer here to suggest that Ando is a writer worth keeping tabs on.
