jami nakamura lin

News & Reviews

“The Night Parade is both an entirely new perspective on bipolar disorder and a fascinating education in mythology by an expert who so clearly loves the material. It might be Lin’s first book, but it possesses the self-assurance, courage, and mastery of a seasoned writer.” – Vulture, 10 Best Memoirs of 2023

“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)

“A moody, unusual, and compassionate portrait of a struggle too often reduced to cliché in stories about mental illness.” – Boston Globe

“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.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“Lin’s braiding of personal experience and cultural touchstones make this memoir very special.” – LA Times

“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’.” – Sydney Morning Herald

“This alignment of folktale and faith puts the reader in a liminal state, perfect for receiving the unutterable.” – Kill Your Darlings (Australia)

“Though mythology provides the well-researched graphic and narrative framework for her “speculative memoir,” her most powerful writing comes from her ability to stare death in the eye and describe how it feels… This is a book about ancestors, both ghosts and human.” – Nichi Bei News

“A memorable and moving exorcism of the monsters within.” Publishers Weekly (starred)

“An engrossing memoir by an extraordinary debut author.” – Library Journal (starred)

“Courageous, inventive and lushly written in a distinctive and lyrical voice, THE NIGHT PARADE is an extraordinary and beautiful examination of life and death, self and parent, history and hope.” – Book Reporter

“Breathtaking… This is a book to keep at your bedside.” – Conde Nast Traveler

“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

“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

“A beautifully rendered memoir in both words and illustrations. . . Family, mental illness, recovery, grief, love — all of these are in this genre-defying book.” – Book Riot

““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

“The Night Parade is meant to be read, shared, and studied for its genuine representation of time and reality collapsing.” – Soapberry Review

5 Books Local Authors Couldn’t Get Enough Of – Honolulu Magazine

55 Books We Loved in 2023 – Boston Globe

“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