A review by kurtwombat
The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad fast-paced

4.25

The world is too big to understand it all at once so we create stories that help us figure it out a piece at a time. Stories that hang around long enough become myths—often beautiful and containing as much poetry as understanding. THE NIGHT PARADE author Jami Nakamura Lin tapped such myths for her memoir.  Her hope was to gain a better understanding of her life while also using her life to better understand the myths. The result is both beautiful and heartbreaking. The early part of the book focuses mostly on the author being bi-polar. Visiting  Japan as a young adult she found gods both capricious and ominous who became stand-ins for different aspects of her life while bi-polar. The book uses a Japanese four act narrative structure which along with enchanting art work by the author’s sister adds comforting layers of structure and a certain amount of grace.   Later the focus shifts more to the author dealing with a “post bi-polar” family life and then a devastating personal grief. I say “post” because unfortunately, after so much focus on her personal health in the first part—there is virtually no mention of it in the latter parts of the book. I assumed she had struck a balance with her medication but it almost felt like losing a limb with the weight of that part of the book suddenly disappearing. Another slight downside, the myths are layered on pretty thick and after a while it was difficult to keep all the gods and demons etc straight.   On the whole however, I feel like I gained a more emotional understanding of the author and a better historical context for the myths—their stories working in service of each other.