The Night Parade
A Speculative Memoir
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Most Anticipated Book by Poets & Writers • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Los Angeles Times • The Millions • Library Journal • Book Riot • Debutiful • and many more!
In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated speculative memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyo—the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons—to shift the cultural narrative around mental illness, grief, and remembrance.
“Jami Nakamura Lin has reinvented the genre of memoir. . . . Serpentine, polyphonic, and stunningly textured, The Night Parade positively pulses with life." — Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, award-winning author of The Fact of a Body
Are these the only two stories? The one, where you defeat your monster, and the other, where you succumb to it?
Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and an array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her father’s cancer grasped hold of their family.
As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin became frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives, and their focus on recovery. She sought comfort in the stories she’d loved as a child—tales of ghostly creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legend, she set out to interrogate the very notion of recovery and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.
Featuring stunning illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, and divided into the four acts of a traditional Japanese narrative structure, The Night Parade is a genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, the grieving process, and other haunted topics with storytelling tradition, Jami Nakamura Lin shines a light into dark corners, driven by a question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gorgeous and unique debut memoir, Lin draws on the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyo (the "Night Parade of One Hundred Demons," in which demons and spirits march through the streets at night) to document her struggles with bipolar disorder and her father's fatal illness. Organizing her tale into a traditional Japanese four-act structure, Lin recounts an adolescence marked by debilitating rage and depression, which led to feelings of shame at appearing "monstrous" to herself and others. After a voluntary admission to the psych ward at 17, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Eventually, Lin learned to regulate the disorder, married, and had a child, though her happiness was undercut by the agony of watching her father's struggle against the cancer that eventually killed him. Throughout, Lin draws on characters from the Hyakki Yagyo (like the hideous, flesh-eating Oni Baba, or the vengeful ghost whale known as Bakekujira) to contextualize and come to terms with her feelings, sometimes using them to personify her "ugly" emotions, other times using them to interrogate cultural narratives about monstrousness. Interspersed throughout are full-color illustrations of each creature by her sister, Cori. "The story is a different story," Lin writes of the mythic yardstick she uses to process her own tragedies; "The story is the same story." The result is a memorable and moving exorcism of the monsters within.
