An extract from Jose Ando’s ‘Jackson Alone’

 Jackson Alone, Jose Ando's short, sharp debut, is about four mixed-raced Black Japanese gay men out for revenge when a disturbing pornographic video of one of them is circulated online. The novel is a page-turning exploration of race, digital culture, belonging, and the hostility of societies that are supposed to protect us. Written with bite but also with surprising tenderness, Jackson Alone asks complex questions about how we see ourselves and how we see others, as well as what it really means to get revenge. In this blog post, the novel’s translator, Kalau Almony, talks about the novel, followed by an extract.

 Kalau Almony writes:

This book means a lot to me. When I first read it all the way back in 2022, I was hooked from the opening and up all night, racing to the end. I was blown away by Ando’s masterful use of shifting perspectives, fell in love with his sharp-tongued yet vulnerable characters, and found myself laughing far more than I expected to, given the serious themes of the work.

Jackson Alone is a novel about race and queerness and belonging. It pulls back the curtain on a part of Japanese society many readers even in Japan are unaware of, a world traced out in glances—furtive, curious, resentful, commanding—and follows those different ways of seeing, animating them as they bring people together and pull them apart. It’s a novel about racism, homophobia, revenge, and revenge porn, and also about how to be defiant and defiantly funny in the face of it all.

As a translator, it was a challenge to make sure Ando’s jokes landed, to recreate the work’s propulsiveness and its rapid swerves from humor to seriousness, to capture characters who are elusive but so full of feeling. But translating this book was also an absolute pleasure. It was a joy and honor to inhabit this work so deeply and to play such a big part in delivering it to others. I hope it keeps you up all night. I hope it makes you laugh. More than anything though, I hope it brings something new to you.

From Jackson Alone: 

The cocoa skin, the devilish eyes, too big and too bright, the limbs like a panther’s. Jackson knew the moment he saw the video that the man tied to the bed was him. He didn’t remember it, and he knew there were tons of people in this world who looked like him. But this was Japan, and here in Japan it was Jackson alone who looked like that and was treated this way.

That morning the temperature had suddenly dropped, and since it felt like fall, Jackson pulled on a long-sleeve T-shirt before biking to work. The shirt was from a brand he didn’t recognize, but he was almost certain his company dress code said he could wear whatever he wanted so long as it wasn’t from a rival sportswear line. On a spacious plot of reclaimed land sat two corporate looking buildings: an office tower that loomed over the entire area and another, smaller building that looked like the first building’s child. That smaller building—the staff fitness center of Athletius Japan’s headquarters— was where Jackson worked. He spent all day in there, giving massages.

His schedule was packed that morning. The company basketball team’s offseason had just ended in August and the players were now back in full swing. His first appointment was with the team’s forward, a man called Zen. For sixty minutes, Jackson tore into Zen’s muscle fibers, shocked by just how quickly they recovered from his touch. All Jackson had to do was run his fingers down Zen’s back two or three times and his muscles would go from being shrunk stiff with disuse to sucking up blood and swelling with each beat of Zen’s heart.

At a certain point during the session, Zen asked Jackson,

“What did you wanna be when you were a teenager?”

“I really just wanted to party,” Jackson said.

“Did you ever think of becoming an athlete?”

“No, never.”

“Why not?”

“Because I found out about partying.”

“Too bad. I bet you’d’ve been good . . .”

No, you’re way more built for this than I am. Jackson thought this but didn’t say it aloud, just continued to knead his fingers into Zen’s muscles. 

And the conversation ends yet again, Zen thought. It always stops when we get to Jackson’s turn, doesn’t it?

He’s unreadable. That was the impression Jackson left on Zen. What did Zen know about Jackson? He was half Japanese and half some kind of African. He used to run track. He’d modeled. He might be gay. All this Zen had heard not from Jackson himself but secondhand—from the rumors his teammates passed around.