THE NIGHT PARADE

November 7, 2023
Mariner/HarperCollins

Purchase on Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Target, Amazon, Books-a-million, or your local indie bookstore.

”A stunning memoir about the stories that make us who we are.” – Kirkus (starred review)

“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

“An extraordinary exploration of life in all its stages.” – The San Francisco Chronicle

Available on November 9 from Scribe UK and January 4 from Scribe (AUS/NZ)

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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 grew 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?

About

Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade (Mariner Books/HarperCollins and Scribe UK, October 24, 2023). A former Catapult columnist, she’s been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, and other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, We Need Diverse Books, and more. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Pennsylvania State University and lives in the Chicago area.

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Early Praise

“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 and illness and mystery. What a moving and notable memoir emerges when these elements are mixed so gracefully together.”
-Aimee Bender, 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… 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, bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark

“A gorgeous invocation of the magic-haunted spaces between lived experience and folkloric traditions, between the living and the dead, between memory and story. I loved THE NIGHT PARADE.”
-Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get in Trouble

“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, award-winning author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir

“A stunning excavation of personal and collective histories… Jami Nakamura Lin writes with meditative precision and expansive empathy, challenging and reaffirming what communal stories can make possible… 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

“Jami Nakamura Lin has reinvented the genre of memoir, weaving an intricate braid of fable, memory, art, cultural legacy, and legend into a gorgeous tapestry of the stories that made her. The haunting illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, are a potent reminder that no one is self-authored. We all collaborate to become ourselves. Serpentine, polyphonic, and stunningly textured, THE NIGHT PARADE positively pulses with life.”
-Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, award-winning author of The Fact of a Body

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