Jackson Alone is a singularly unique novel that subverts expectations with a cast of characters who are each vividly imagined, performing confusing and surreal acts in a Twilight Zone ethereality. Written by Jose Ando—a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and translated by Kalau Almony—known for his translations of unique and intense stories—Jackson Alone is a slim novel that gut-punches weirdness.
Like Ando himself, the titular character is a mixed-race man of African and Japanese descent who works as a massage therapist at an athletics company. The foreignness of his appearance is the point of the novel—and at every turn, the way an African-Asian man looks plays a pivotal plot role—with the novel even opening with, “the cocoa skin, the devilish eyes, too big and too bright… this was Japan, and here in Japan it was Jackson alone who looked like that”. It is hardly a spoiler to note that Jackson’s assumption is wrong; through a cruel twist of fate, he meets several men who look almost too similar to him, “half Japanese and half some kind of African”, and who are queer; another marker that separates Jackson from the Japanese masses.
While at work one day, wearing what he assumes to be a nondescript t-shirt, Jackson realises that through his shirt, “in the seemingly random black-and-white pattern on its back, one could just make out a faint square.” The square, when presented with a phone camera, shifts into a QR code. Unfortunately for Jackson, several of his co-workers sitting behind him at the cafeteria start taking pictures of one another, leading to the revelation.
The linked website plays a video of a man who looks a lot like Jackson on a bed, wearing a mask that connects a tube to his rear, in a BDSM porn act the novel calls “man-howling”. The group, equally disgusted and intrigued, fill in the gaps for the others: “If he makes any noise, it’ll play inside him and his whole body’ll work like a speaker, then he’ll make even more noise because of the pain”.
As Jackson sees the video, he realises that it is him, with the familiar carpeting of the Hotel Sagitari, a shady meeting place for queer hookups, backdoor deals, and the other activities of the fringe. Hoping that his peers can’t tell mixed-race men apart, he denies his involvement, claiming that he isn’t the man in the video.
Ando is a singular voice in the literary world.
The introduction of the video is the catalyst of the novel, leading Jackson to cross paths with three other Asian-African queer men: Ibuki, a porn star; X, a reality TV-show contestant; and Jerin, a drag performer. The four are strikingly similar in their appearance—or perhaps they aren’t, but are just foreign enough that no one can tell them apart.
The Hotel Sagitari becomes their refuge, a shared space where the group begin trading identities like costumes, slipping into each other’s mannerisms, wardrobes, and lives with uncanny ease. The goal is to find the perpetrator of Jackson’s abuse and exact revenge. Yet as the story moves along, it becomes just one aspect of their new lives with each other.
Chaos, comedy, and confusion ensue. A police officer stops one on the street, only to be handed the other’s ID; the officer cannot tell the difference, but is suspicious all the same. A lover, reaching out to the wrong face, gets punched—a case of deliberate mistaken identity with real, physical stakes.
Key distinctions between the individuals are lost, and they all become vaguely the same. The novel finds its sharpest edge: in the comedy of mistaken identity lies a quieter, more unsettling satire, a reflection of a society so rigid in its racial imagination that two African-Asian individuals need only share a few characteristics to become, in the eyes of everyone around them, effectively the same person. The absurdity with which they find each other also adds a haze of unreality to the situation, leading the reader to question whether or not there really are so many African-Asian queer men in such a small radius of Tokyo. Has Jackson imagined the rest of the novel? Is Jackson really, as the title suggests, alone?
Ando has far more fun asking these questions than answering them, creating a structurally interesting story, but one that is often too disorienting to follow—though whether that confusion is a flaw or the point is, perhaps, part of the novel’s game.
Jackson Alone is a novel of big themes: racial profiling, the rigidity of Japanese society, data collection, kink extremism online, the value of community, and the dangers of being pushed into the fringes. Yet it often feels as though the novel doesn’t have the space to see the themes through, switching back and forth constantly, always preferring the mundane over the spectacular.
Regardless, Ando is a singular voice in the literary world, and one that is, at the turn of every page, thrillingly original.