The night parade: a speculative memoir - jami nakamura lin

In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias , a gorgeously illustrated speculative 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 young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and self-medicating, an evolving array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her fathers cancer grasped hold of their family.

As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin grew increasingly frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives and their focus on recovery.

She sought comfort in the stories shed 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 conflict and resolution, grief and loss, 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 four acts in the traditional Japanese narrative structure, The Night Parade is an innovative, 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 the storytelling tradition, Jami Nakamura Lin shines a light into dark corners in search of a new way, driven by a question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?.