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The Night Parade
The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir | Jami Nakamura Lin
4 posts | 2 read | 3 to read
"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. Serpentine, polyphonic, and stunningly textured, The Night Parade positively pulses with life." -- Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, award-winning author of The Fact of a Body 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 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?
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keepingupwiththepenguins
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Lin offers remarkable insight, her academic understanding of both illness and narrative informing an unusually keen self-awareness. Her experience of mental illness defies the story we‘re comfortable with (“things were bad, then they got better, now I am healed and strong”), and she doesn‘t shy away from that. Full review: https://keepingupwiththepenguins.com/the-night-parade-jami-nakamura-lin/

batsy This sounds super interesting and such a great cover! 10mo
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readingjedi
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This is lovely. I love the writer's style, which echoes the ebb & flow of her thoughts & emotions. I love how she views her experiences of her bipolar illness & the death of her father through the lens of Japanese folklore. I love the language - poetic, tentative, wistful, melancholy - entirely conveying Jami's state of mind. I love how she engages with the concept of 'storytelling'. I love how she loves her family & their history. I just love it!

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bnp
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Am finding this memoir slow going, but interesting. Not reading much this weekend because I'm with family, but hope to continue on the plane ride home tomorrow.

#NetGalleyGroup #NGGSummerSmashup

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bnp
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I'll be reading one of these two on the plane tomorrow.

Rabiha steps out of her hut, sets out to warn the Mahdi. (River Spirit)

In the beginning I choose kishōtenketsu, the Japanese version of the four-part narrative structure that flows from Chinese poetry. (The Night Parade)

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

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