jami nakamura lin

The Night Parade

Mariner/HarperCollins, November 2023

Available for purchase at Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Books-a-million | Women & Children First | your local indie

The 2024 Chicago Review of Books Winner in Nonfiction

A Boston Globe & Vulture/NY Magazine Best Book of 2023

A Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Starred Book

A Featured/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

”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

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?