Night Parade

In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated lyrical memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyō — 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 Japanese Taiwanese American woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and self-medicating, an ever-evolving array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships with those she loved — especially her father — suffered as a result.
Frustrated with the tidy arc of the typical mental illness memoir, the kind whose trajectory leads toward being ‘better’, Lin sought comfort in the Japanese folklore she’d loved as a child, tales of supernatural creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yōkai and other East Asian mythology, she set out to interrogate the Western notion of conflict and resolution, grief, loss, mental illness, and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.
Divided into four acts in the traditional Japanese narrative structure and featuring stunning watercolour illustrations, Jami Nakamura Lin has crafted an innovative, genre-bending, and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between worlds. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, and other haunted topics with the folkloric tradition, The Night Parade shines a light into dark corners in search of a new way, driven by the question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?

Reviews

‘The Night Parade turns grief and mental illness into a metaphor that’s captured in the collective stories of yōkai — the demons, spirits, and magical apparitions of Japanese folklore. The yōkai are richly illustrated in the book by Lin’s sister, Cori … The fantastical inclusions also introduce time travel, so that multiple timelines can run parallel in ways that more accurately represent the pandemonium of the neurodivergent experience … But Lin’s yōkai only partly function as metaphor for her mental illness. They have just as much, or maybe more, to say about identity, intergenerational trauma and inheritance. The metaphor, like the experience of mental illness, is deeply tangled with the body, with community, with the structures that determine our fates.’