Review of My Annihilation by author Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Sam Bett
We all love a good revenge thriller. Something about that primal behavior of an eye for an eye will never stop engaging an audience. The novel My Annihilation takes revenge and stretches it out to Oldboy level proportions. Rarely does a character take this much time and effort to ruin a person and there is no way that it won’t ruin them in the process as well.
The book begins with a man in a strange and isolated cabin. He is in the process of taking a new identity and he’s reading a manifest written by the man who he will become. It gives us flashbacks to stories of murder, abuse, and sexual awakening.
The manifest was written by Ryodai Kozuka and he was apparently the wrong man to steal an identity from. He was oddly prepared for someone to steal his identity and now the man is involved in something he never anticipated. It involves a body in a suitcase and that can’t be good.
The man is stealing the identity because he has to flee some bad deeds that he cannot live with. He committed some uniquely horrible acts on a psychotherapy patient that he fell in love with despite all best practices. He considers his intentions benevolent but that doesn’t change that he absolutely destroyed her already awful life.
The book twists and turns to different narratives, new names for old characters, and bizarre events that all lead to destruction. Themes of self, mind, memory, hypnosis, and identity are muddled in this complex story in a way that is impossible to detangle, not that we have to.
Turn this page, and you may give up your entire life.
Fuminori Nakamura – My Annihilation
It also aims to address the question of inherent evil. Is anyone born evil or are they made to do evil acts? Does anyone deserve punishment for their evil acts? If so, who has the right to serve that punishment?
Author Nakamura, who is just recently being discovered in the West despite immense popularity in his native Japan, weaves a complicated but coherent story with some of the most haunting lines I’ve read in some time. This is the kind of book that really sticks with you.
There are many aspects of this book that will be difficult to read. Trigger warnings could be applied for physical and emotional abuse, incest, suicide, all sorts of mental health issues, violence, sexual violence, and torture. If you prepare yourself to be subjected to these points you are ready to read My Annihilation. Just know that none of this is treated lightly, it’s very clear that these are all bad things!
If there was ever such a thing as a psychological thriller My Annihilation is it. It dives into the deep end of the characters’ most inner thoughts and consciousness to dissect what makes them do what they do. It’s intimate and terrifying and I strongly recommend it.
5/5 legs 🦵🏻🦵🏻🦵🏻🦵🏻🦵🏻
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