The Night Parade (A Speculative Memoir)

In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated lyrical 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.

‘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 Japanese Taiwanese American woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and self-medicating, an ever-evolving array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships with those she loved — especially her father — suffered as a result.

Frustrated with the tidy arc of the typical mental illness memoir, the kind whose trajectory leads toward being ‘better’, Lin sought comfort in the Japanese folklore she’d loved as a child, tales of supernatural creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other East Asian mythology, she set out to interrogate the Western notion of conflict and resolution, grief, loss, mental illness, and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.

Divided into four acts in the traditional Japanese narrative structure and featuring stunning watercolour illustrations, Jami Nakamura Lin has crafted an innovative, genre-bending, and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between worlds. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, and other haunted topics with the folkloric tradition, The Night Parade shines a light into dark corners in search of a new way, driven by the question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?

Author: Jami Nakamura Lin

Paperback  Published 9 January 2024  352 pages

 

Review by Kae

I found this to be the most intelligent and most human memoir I have ever read, affective at its core as a rejection of the mental illness narrative of diagnosis to cure, start to end, the patient unqualified to speak to their own narrative. Here, through the lens of Japanese folktales of ghosts, Nakamura Lin contemplates what and how we share of ourselves, when tasked to retell one's own once upon a time that she otherwise feels disconnected from; wherein the spectres of mental illness, motherhood and diaspora, each haunt the narration with a heavy sense of loss. I especially enjoyed the final section concerned with how we philosophise death and grief, as Nakamura Lin challenges the Western compulsion to literally and metaphorically bury the dead out of sight, with grief something to overcome, as she rather rebuilds the phantasmic form of her father remembered through the margins of pages and myth.

 

'The Night Parade is a stunning excavation of personal and collective histories, filled with the endless alchemy of storytelling. Jami Nakamura Lin writes with meditative precision and expansive empathy, challenging and reaffirming what communal stories can make possible. Exploring the many worlds that flourish beyond certain knowledge, this boundary-blurring memoir finds power in the undefinable. It reveals to us that the fracturing of a story can be beautifully fruitful. Teeming with language that is transformative and fully embodied, and gorgeously illustrated by Cori Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade is a generous and abundant feast for our living and our dead, our salvaged lineages, and our continuing stories.’ K-MING CHANG, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF BESTIARY