‘Beautifully written and imaginative, The Night Parade takes speculative nonfiction to new heights. Jami Nakamura Lin is both poet and storyteller, mystic and philosopher, teaching us to see the world differently, to suspend our disbelief, using mythology to interrogate our notions of family, grief, fear, love, and belonging. There is no other book like this — it’s truly a stunning and visionary work of art.’
Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls: a memoir
‘With abundant honesty and tenderness, Jami Nakamura Lin wraps her story in the expansive frameworks of folklore and the mystical, bringing in centuries of storytelling about love and loss, death, illness, and mystery. A moving and notable memoir.’
Aimee Bender, New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
‘Genre-defying and deeply poetic, The Night Parade invites the pandemonium within the personal and mythic to a round table where ancestors and folkloric creatures transform grief, memory, and mental illness into the tangible. Ancient tales and horrific spectres braid throughout Jami Nakamura Lin’s life, but will worm your way under your skin, prompting the question: what do we cut out from our lives and histories and what do we let grow with us? Impossible to put down, gut-wrenching, and magical. I cannot think of a writer who has written so personally while acknowledging ancestral and cultural grief with such grace and honesty. A crucial and groundbreaking entry for the literature of the Asian Diaspora and explorations of mental illness.’
Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark
‘At once a medical memoir ... and a reflection on mythology — the personal, the collective, the inherited — The Night Parade moves with courage ... Jami Nakamura Lin’s speculative memoir is a feat of storytelling; one that I found deeply moving.’
Katie Goh
‘The Night Parade is stunning — it is haunting and magical and terrifying at once. Deeply intimate, but with a sense of scope that transcends history and genre, I loved stepping into this dream of a memoir, of a shared experience.’
Catherine Cho, author of Inferno
‘Lin’s braiding of personal experience and cultural touchstones make this memoir very special.’
Los Angeles Times
‘This genre-bending and emotionally resonant memoir offers a masterfully braided narrative of Lin’s experience with mental illness, the death of her father, the grieving process, and Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legends to interrogate the very notion of recovery. The result is a deeply textured portrait of the experiences that haunt us and the ways in which we can begin to feel whole again.’
Chicago Review of Books
‘Beautiful and bizarre … explode[s] conventional narratives of mental illness and grief … weaves together fable and memory, research, and family history with elegance and honesty to create a singular record of family, diaspora, art, and belonging.’
Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Magazine
‘In an extraordinary exploration of life in all its stages, debut memoirist Jami Nakamura Lin turns to the monsters of Japanese and Taiwanese folklore to better understand her own mental illness, the death of her father and the birth of her child. Featuring illustrations of these fantastical beasts by the author’s sister Cori Nakamura Lin, this book is an “abundant feast for our living and our dead”, according to … author K-Ming Chang.’
San Francisco Chronicle
‘Part personal narrative, part mythical taxonomy, The Night Parade intertwines Nakamura Lin’s lifelong experience of bipolar disorder with figures from Japanese and Taiwanese myth, resulting in a moody, unusual, and compassionate portrait of a struggle too often reduced to cliché.’
The Boston Globe
‘The Night Parade turns grief and mental illness into a metaphor that’s captured in the collective stories of yokai — the demons, spirits, and magical apparitions of Japanese folklore. The yokai are richly illustrated in the book by Lin’s sister, Cori … The fantastical inclusions also introduce time travel, so that multiple timelines can run parallel in ways that more accurately represent the pandemonium of the neurodivergent experience … But Lin’s yokai only partly function as metaphor for her mental illness. They have just as much, or maybe more, to say about identity, intergenerational trauma and inheritance. The metaphor, like the experience of mental illness, is deeply tangled with the body, with community, with the structures that determine our fates.’
Sam van Zweden, Kill Your Darlings
‘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 … 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 contextualise 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-colour illustrations of each creature by her sister, Cori … The result is a memorable and moving exorcism of the monsters within.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘Lin uses mythology from her Taiwanese and Japanese heritage to make sense of mental illness, cancer, and pregnancy loss … Throughout this inventive narrative, Lin takes calculated literary risks, ranging from the use of epistolary forms to experiments with point of view. These risks pay off mightily, coming together in a vulnerable, insightful, and refreshingly original meditation on survival, illness, and grief. A stunning memoir about the stories that make us who we are.’
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘In this highly innovative memoir, Lin shares her experiences as a person with bipolar disorder as she comes of age, marries, experiences a miscarriage, loses her father to cancer, and becomes a mother … With compelling prose, this title weaves folktales about frightening and monstrous figures into the narratives of Lin’s own developing bipolar disorder, her lineage, and her father's illness. Her gorgeous writing draws readers into her gripping story, which is organised into a four-part narrative structure drawn from Japanese literary tradition. The book is richly illustrated by the author’s sister, Cori Nakamura Lin. An engrossing memoir by an extraordinary debut author.’
Library Journal, starred review
‘“In the presence of a story … time collapses. This is why I am always telling it.” So begins Lin’s memoir-cum-bestiary, a narrative of discovering her bipolar disorder, the struggle to start a family, and her beloved father’s death and its aftermath. Along the way, she tells stories of the yokai, the liminal, ambiguous, supernatural creatures of Japanese folk and fairy tale, in the legends of which Lin finds parallels to her family’s experience of colonisation, trauma, immigration, and community. Illustrated in dreamy gouache and watercolour by Cori Nakamura Lin, the author’s sister, The Night Parade explores the many ways we — humans as individuals, humans in community — use stories to make sense of our lives. When calamity strikes, as in every life it must, the tales of the yokai tell us why and how we can keep it from happening again. “To prevent disaster,” Lin writes, “worship the thing that eats you.” Heartfelt and thoughtful, this painfully lovely memoir will appeal to readers of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches.’
Booklist
‘In this debut speculative memoir, Lin isn’t afraid of her demons. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, Lin struggled to manage her illness while caring for her cancer-stricken father. Unhappy with the rose-coloured narratives about recovering from mental illness, she takes a different approach here, leaning into the darkness. Inspired by Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan ghost stories, Lin blends memoir and horror — plus stunning illustrations — to consider what it means to co-exist with anguish.’
The Millions
‘Based on a traditional Japanese narrative structure, this riveting speculative memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin is accompanied by the luminous illustrations of her sister, Cori. Grappling with themes of family, neurodivergence, illness, and identity, Nakamura Lin presents a nuanced, raw, and poetic redefinition of memoir.’
Ms. magazine
‘Before you even get to the first chapter, you’ll be stunned by the beauty of this hardback, and the illustrations by the author’s sister, Cori Nakamura Lin … Lin offers remarkable insight, her academic understanding of both illness and narrative informing an unusually keen self-awareness. Her experience of mental illness defies the story we’re comfortable with, and she doesn’t shy away from that. Using the traditional Japanese narrative structure (four acts), she tells a different story, one that’s perhaps more true and realistic, but challenging to read at times.’
Keeping Up With The Penguins
‘Inventive … Jami Nakamura Lin weaves together threads of memoir and Japanese and Taiwanese mythology to create a gorgeous mosaic of family, grief, illness, inheritance, and love.’
Shondaland
‘Both heart-wrenching and heart-filling … It’s breathtaking to read the way [Jami Nakamura Lin] skillfully utilises the Hyakki Yagyo — a procession of supernatural oni and yokai in Japanese folklore and mythology — to recontextualise and reconsider narratives of grief, mental illness, and memory-making. This is a book to keep at your bedside.’
Conde Nast Traveler
‘This is a special book. A memoir, but so much more … an amazing read.’
Neale Lucas, Good Reading Magazine
‘Epic in structure, this is, as much as anything else, a simply written, often poignant examination of “the things we fear and do not understand”.’
Steven Carroll, The Sydney Morning Herald
