Jackson Alone

In this award-winning revenge thriller from one of Japan’s brightest new novelists, four mixed-race Black Japanese gay men go toe to toe with the marginalization they’ve experienced in the country they call home Nobody at the corporate offices of Athletius Japan really knows the massage therapist, Jackson, but rumors abound. He used to work as a model. He likes to party. He’s mixed race—half-Japanese, half-somewhere-in-Africa-n. He might be gay. Fueling the gossip is the sudden appearance of a disturbing pornographic video featuring a man bound to a bed—a man who looks like a lot like Jackson. It spreads like wildfire at Jackson’s workplace, and nobody believes Jackson when he says it’s not him. When Jackson serendipitously meets three other queer mixed-race guys, he learns that he’s not the only one being targeted by the video. Together they concoct a plan: find out who’s responsible and, in the meantime, switch identities and exact revenge on those who’ve wronged them, exploiting the fact that nobody can seem to tell them apart. A short, blistering gut punch of a novel, Jackson Alone is at turns satirical and deadpan, angry and tender—a frank exploration of identity, race, and queerness in contemporary Japan that announces Jose Ando as a singular new talent in the global literary scene.