A remarkable memoir with great descriptive and unique writing.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

Stunning memoir. I'm not all the way through, but feel entranced by Lin's storytelling. The stories circle around each other, weaving together grief and mythologies and bipolar, along with the metanarrative. A dynamic and searching voice. Skillful, beautiful memoir writing. Can't wait to read more!

While this memoir has been compared to Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, I found The Night Parade to be a one-of-a-kind read. In it, Jami Nakamura Lin uses Japanese mythology to explore her experience of bipolar disorder, parenthood, partnership, and her father’s death from cancer. Lin describes her memoir as a book-length essay—a form especially suited for uncertainty and wondering. She employs an impressive repertoire of various points of view, including storytelling, third person past, second person present (as if addressing the reader directly), narrating herself as heroine, and monologuing to her daughter. I especially enjoyed how she invokes the imagery of a parade of spirits as she progresses through labor overnight. Lin is a deep thinker. I so relished her reflections and questions throughout. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for this Advanced Readers Copy of The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin!

Every year, I lead writing workshops centered on the memoir. In them, we talk about what a memoir is and isn’t, how to identify your memoir’s desire line, and which events from your life’s timeline influence that desire line. We note how, even though every memoir is wildly different, memoir as a genre is fairly formulaic. Though “good” writing isn’t something that can be taught, my students agree, how to write a memoir that follows the formula is.

But every once in a while, a book like Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade (2023) comes along that upends the whole genre; and then, talking about what a memoir isn’t doesn’t hold much water. These books redefine what memoir is and can be. They say, Actually, there’s room here for experimentation, for play, for stories within stories … and in the case of The Night Parade, yes, even for short fiction at the heart of nonfiction! At which point, it’s back to the drawing board for me, as I redesign my lessons to account for memoirs at the fringes, memoirs that don’t follow all the “rules.”

There’s still a desire line in The Night Parade: Lin wants to make peace with her father’s early death from cancer. And we get the familiar beats of a cancer narrative: life before cancer, the diagnosis, treatment (a.k.a, “the battle”), resolution (remission or, here, death), life after. But it’s like Lin threw these beats into a mixing bowl, gave them a stir, and watched to see what floated first to the top. Events are told out of order. They are interspersed with memories of Lin’s own “battles” against bipolar disorder, miscarriage, and mouth granulomas. We get snippets of journal entries—her own, and her father’s—and letters written to a child not yet old enough to read them. At times, her grandparents on both sides appear to give the reader a history lesson on Okinawa, Japanese Imperial rule, and World War II. All while Lin’s father lies on a hospital bed in the background.

Most disrupting—and I would argue, effecting—is the way Lin constantly frames and reframes her own mythology through that of Japanese yokai mythology. Even Lin struggles to describe exactly what yokai are, but to say they’re spirit-creatures would be a close approximation. Some resemble ogres or mermaids. One’s a fox with multiple tails. There’s a whale that can curse whole villages for generations. The yokai are what lend The Night Parade its title, since the fabled Night Parade occurs when the spirit-creatures gather together and “cavort” through the streets of Kyoto. They also give the book its structure. Each new chapter opens with an illustration (by the author’s sister, Cori) and overview of a different yokai, the latter of which teeters between academic and whimsical. Lin then borrows that particular spirit-creature’s personality and traits to comment on herself, her family members, and the events unfolding in their lives until her tale, too, becomes almost mythic—because its on the scale of, and rooted in, the epic.

The next time you want to read something different, arresting, compelling, and strangely beautiful, pick up Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade. It’s a “speculative” memoir that refuses to be a memoir in the traditional sense, and it’s one I’ll be including in future memoir-writing workshops.

Wow... just wow. What a remarkable book!

The Night Parade is a breathtaking memoir about mental illness and grief explored through the lens of Japanese folklore. Nakamura Lin writes with raw honesty and so much heart. The Night Parade has got to be one of my favourite books this year!

The author writes about feeling monstrous most of her life- living with undiagnosed bipolar can do that to you- something I understand all too well thanks to my own struggles with mental health (in my case it is borderline personality disorder) Jami Nakamura Lin says what I think is on most of our minds and for that I respect her. Her writing is poetic and stunning without being flowery- flowing so well I often forgot I was reading. I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese folklore- especially tales of yokai and the night parade of one hundred demons- so I was delighted by the myths and legends Nakamura Lin wove in amongst her own stories and memories. This is not to mention the gorgeous illustrations done by the author’s younger sister that really added to the experience of reading The Night Parade. I cannot praise this book enough!

It is a rare and beautiful thing to find yourself within the pages of someone else’s memories but I did so in this book. Nakamura Lin’s journey is so uniquely hers but also so like many of ours. Not only did I find myself in it but also strength and hope. I would recommend this book to everyone- whether or not you suffer from mental illness. Though The Night Parade draws on the narrative of the supernatural and otherworldly it is so remarkably and painfully human.

If you had any doubts about picking up The Night Parade do yourself a favour and cast them aside. Absolutely everyone should read it!

Very enjoyable read. Will be easy to recommend to many different kinds of readers. I’d like to read more from this author.

This books is lovely, lyrical, and so original. I've never read a memoir quite like it. It tells the story of the author's life--her childhood leading up to a diagnosis with bipolar disorder, her father's cancer diagnosis and her desire to have a child amid that, and the aftermath of both her pregnanc(ies) and her father's death. It interweaves that story with lush descriptions of figures from japanese mythology and the ways that such figures inflect her life. I particularly appreciated her negotiations with the archive. THE NIGHT PARADE. is a stunning and worthy addition to contemporary memoir, and certain to inspire many other students of the field.