By Samantha Diaz
Have you read a book about living your life as if it were lore? In her speculative memoir, The Night Parade, Jami Nakamura Lin writes about her experience with bipolar disorder during a time of grief after losing her father.
Written in a non-Western style called kishōtenketsu, the memoir follows “the Japanese version of the four-part narrative structure that flows from Chinese poetry.” In four parts, Nakamura Lin shares pivotal moments in her life centering on her, her father, and her bipolar disorder. Each chapter within the four parts introduces a lore from Japanese, Taiwanese, or Okinawan folklore and mythology. Additionally, the illustrations at the beginning of each chapter (drawn by the author’s sister, Cori Nakamura Lin) provide an idea of what the reader will feel and envision moving forward into the chapter.
For example, Cori illustrates a dragon wearing an emperor’s cap as he floats in water to introduce him as the spirit Ryujin, “the DragonKing who controls the tides and lives in a palace at the bottom of the sea.” The dragon is positioned as if he is looking slightly downward, perhaps at the humans who value land over the sea. The legend goes that a man named Urashima Tarō was married to Ryujin’s daughter and they lived under the sea in the DragonKing’s castle; but Urashima Tarō wanted to go back home and visit his family. Once on land, he learned that the life he once knew was not his anymore. Because he chose to go back on land, the DragonKing no longer wanted Urashima Tarō. This may be interpreted as immigration. Nakamura Lin introduces her fantastical world with a tale of the ocean and gods, as a means of connecting the ocean’s importance with her family’s migration from Japan and Taiwan to America and how they settled near the island of O’ahu and along the coast of California.
In this same chapter, when Urashima Tarō is back on land, he discovers his parents were dead and he lived on as a legend amongst his village. Here Nakamura Lin asks, “do you think it is better to be the parents, dead, or Urashima Tarō, alive, lost in a time no longer his own?” This begins the memoir by introducing central themes to the novel: her mental health and her father. The chapter goes on to reveal the first memory about her father and a fishing trip they took together when she was in college. Throughout the memoir Nakamura Lin delivers caring, painful memories of her father during a time where her mental health morphs and changes.
As mentioned before, each story engages with a folktale or a myth and in the section titled “Automythologies I,” Nakamura Lin works in the story of the yokai. She describes the yokai to be a reflection of “culture’s questions and fears,” which serves as a tool to discuss the fear, questions, and doubts that may occur when living with a mental illness.
“The archive of my life is the archive of my ghosts. Reading it, you would think my entire life was haunted.”
Further along in part two of the memoir, Nakamura Lin refers to a mental illness that she terms as her “haunt.” It takes years for a diagnosis, but a doctor confirms that the narrator exhibits bipolar tendencies. Although she had suspected it as a teenager, the wait to be properly diagnosed and treated meant that she had to deal with her emotions in a different manner. This is where Nakamura Lin introduces “The Rage.”
Written as if it were a folktale character, “The Rage” is the outlet a young Nakamura Lin takes to let out her tendencies. As an adult, she learns that the “The Rage” is psychomotor agitation, a condition of bipolar disorder “characterized by unintentional and purposeless motions and restlessness.” The naming of her psychomotor agitation shows how, not only does she write about mythical creatures and folktales, she also writes about her own life as if it were a fictional world. “The Rage” shows how her memoir shares more than just cultural stories and how it engages in the creation of a new tale surrounding her current realities.
The third part is emotionally hard to get through, but important to the memories and purpose of the memoir. The narrator’s father is dying from cancer and while this is shared early on in the book, this is where the tale is caught up to the moment of truth –“I do not want my father as myth. I want my father as father.”
This part comes across as a race against time. The anxiety of fading moments, paused careers, and pregnancy struggles: it is all an extension of the limited amount of time Nakamura Lin’s father has to experience each important milestone with her. She wants to give him a grandchild. She wants him to have those precious memories. She wants to have a smooth transition into this new chapter of her life. But as Nakamura Lin shared in the beginning, nothing is ever that simple.
Part four ties in the reality of the after. After loss. After death. The mourning that lingers for years after. The guilt that he will never get to experience important milestones such as his first grandchild and how her daughter will not know her grandfather. However, Nakamura Lin takes comfort knowing how much love her daughter has for her father which keeps his memory alive. Nakamura Lin writes, “My horror is not of death, where the living and the ones they mourn are irrevocably dispatched to different timelines. It is of the death of memory.” In this section, she introduces the Afterlife.
The Night Parade is a strong, intentional story. There are many pockets to discuss and events to summarize, and I want you to experience what I felt when reading it. Nakamura Lin opens up her vulnerability, expressing heartfelt reactions and painstakingly detailed prose. My own heart cracked and shattered as I replayed my own haunts in my mind. Although I did not live the same life as her, her words took me to a place within my personal life that I buried far beneath my conscious thoughts. I know I will reread this speculative memoir over and over again to further explore the haunts we all carry.
The Night Parade is meant to be read, shared, and studied for its genuine representation of time and reality collapsing. With its honest truths about mental health and stages of growth, Nakamura Lin has created a new tale of her own, filled with riveting and vital discussions of mental health, mindfulness, and loss.
The Night Parade is available from Astoria Bookshop, Bookshop, City Lights Bookstore, Green Bean Books, Loyalty Bookstore, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Samantha Desirae Diaz is a writer who explores true crime, paranormal, and romance stories. Born and raised in Chino, CA, she earned her B.A. in screenwriting from California State University, Northridge, and her M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.