Jackson Alone

Four Black Japanese gay men team up against a culture where discrimination is deep-seated and revenge is just a click away. A searing, darkly funny debut from the Akutagawa Prize-winning author.

Nobody at the corporate offices of Athletius Japan knows much about 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 violent pornographic video featuring a man who looks a lot like Jackson.

When Jackson serendipitously meets three other queer mixed-race guys, he learns he’s not the only one being targeted. Together they concoct a plan: find out who’s responsible and, in the meantime, switch identities and play tricks on people--a boyfriend, a boss--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, queerness, and discrimination in contemporary Japan that announces Jose Ando as a singular new talent in the global literary scene.

Jose Ando was born and raised in Tokyo, and is of African-Asian heritage. His debut novel Jackson Alone was awarded the 59th Bungei Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Akutagawa Prize, as was his second novel, The Camouflaged Man. His third novel, Dtopia, won the 172nd Akutagawa Prize, solidifying his presence as one of Japan’s brightest young literary stars.

Kalau Almony is a Japanese-English literary translator based in Kawasaki, Japan. His translations include the work of Fuminori Nakamura, Tahi Saihate, and Shinya Tanaka, and he is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow. Born and raised in Kailua, Hawaiʻi, Kalau completed his BA in Comparative Literature at Brown University and MA in East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.