Tokyo Ueno Station Paperback – International Edition, March 4, 2019

A very unique book told by a ghost. A commentary on all the faceless people in societies.

None yet.

The book begins, "I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there's the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered [?], but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end."So what is Yu Miri's book Tokyo Ueno Station? It's glimpses of the life of a laborer, Kazu, born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor. The book includes history—the firebombing of Tokyo, Saigo Takemori's role in the Meiji Restoration . . . Japanese funeral rituals—the death of the narrator's 21-year-old son . . . a picture of contemporary Japan most tourists don't see—the lives of the homeless . . . and an unusual narrator—"Things like [hydrangeas in bloom] always made me feel lonely when I was alive."And because the narrator is dead, it raises questions about an afterlife I'll touch on in a moment.Miri was born to Korean parents in Yokohama in1968. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, "Her father was a compulsive gambler who physically abused his wife and children; her mother was a bar hostess who frequently took the teenaged Yū along to parties, where Yū was occasionally molested. One of Yū’s sisters became an actress in pornographic films. Yū became so confused about languages—when to use Japanese or Korean—that she developed a stutter. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old; she repeatedly tried to commit suicide as a teenager and was eventually expelled from high school."Nevertheless, she's been celebrated as a playwright and novelist, winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel Kazoku shinema (Family Cinema) in 1997. She's received threats from Japanese right-wingers who see her as defaming the country and being an ethnic Korean and non-citizen does not help. Gold Rush, a violent story of children in a dysfunctional family, was her first novel to be translated into English.Kazu Mori tells his story, much of it in dialect in the original, making Morgan Giles's smooth translation even more impressive. Kazu left his wife and children in Fukushima to find work in Tokyo building structures for the 1964 Olympics. Because there was still no work in the northeast even during the boom years, he stayed in Tokyo, returning home long enough to sire a son and a daughter. Eventually he moves back. His son dies. His daughter marries and moves away. His wife dies. His granddaughter moves in with him to care for him. However he thinks, "She shouldn't be tied down here with her granddad,' and slips away to live as a homeless person in Tokyo's Ueno Park.Much of the novel's action takes place in Ueno, which has the zoo and a number of museums. It is a favorite spot to picnic during cherry blossom viewing. The cops clear the park of the cardboard and vinyl tarp shelters when the royal family has an official occasion to visit. At the end of the book Kazu dies, which is hardly a spoiler because he's told us on page 33 he's dead.Tokyo Ueno Station is short; you can read it in a single sitting. It's an interesting presentation of what I'm willing to believe is a possible—representative? emblematic?—Japanese life. As such it does not have a conventional plot. But the claim of a dead narrator made me consider.Kazu talks as if he were alive and recalling events from his life. But at one point he notices a bird, "and I wondered if perhaps the bird was Koichi," his dead son. Certainly a thorough-going Buddhist could well his son has been reincarnated as a bird. But, if so, why hasn't the narrator been reincarnated? (Okay, maybe he's in the bardo if you want to bring in an idea that does not exist in the book.)But there's more. The family are Pure Land (Jōdo) Buddhists, and the book emphasizes they are not Shingon, Tendai, or Sōtō Buddhists. In this teaching, "if one repeated the name of Amida Buddha, countless other Buddhas would surround you and bring you happiness. These would be the dead, who had returned to the Pure Land, and who would now protect us." But there is no indication Kazu has returned to the Pure Land and he does not protect anyone.So what is being dead like? Like being being alive but without a body? Like being reincarnated as a bird or some other creature? Or like going to the Pure Land which is "inhabited by many gods, men, flowers, fruits, and adorned with wish-granting trees where rare birds come to rest"?I am, I know, asking far too much of Tokyo Ueno Station. None of these questions reduce the power of the book. Giles is currently translating another Yu Mori novel, The End of August, "an experimental, semi-autobiographical epic spanning Korea and Japan over several decades and generation." I look forward to reading it.

This is an odd, affecting book that addresses many compelling themes in a compact narrative of loss: the opaqueness of Japanese culture as it faces the problems of class, family and empire; the inexorable losses that accumulate in a long life; the insignificance of an individual's life in the face of endless time. The protagonist reflects on his absence as a father during his children's youth, his inattention at the moment of his wife's death, his burden to his granddaughter, his lack of fortune. In other words, it's not a light read. The author herself is an interesting "artifact" of Japanese culture, as a child of Korean parents born in Japan, writing in Japanese about Japan, but probably without hope of general acceptance in Japan. Her stinging critiques of contemporary Japanese life -- the alleged collective passivity that undermines morality, the rise of youth violence, the shabby treatment of minorities and the poor -- contribute to a vivid sensibility, but not a popular one. As is often the case in East Asian fiction, landscape and human-shaped nature (the park, sparrows, hydrangeas, gingkoes, rain) play a big part in the narrative, and I always find it a warming influence in the writing. I have two doubts about this otherwise worthy book. First, the description of Japan's history (Ueno Park, etc.) that informs the book is too didactic. A homeless savant named Shige plays the chorus, telling us more than we want to know and interrupting the emotional pilgrimage our protagonist is on. Second, though the translation is lovely in general, I tripped over a grammatical error in case ("The fourteen years between Masao and I made him more like my child than my brother") and wondered about the use of "they" as a singular pronoun in the middle of a whole host of pronouns. The passage is as follows: "If you fall into a pit you can climb out, but once you slip from a sheer cliff, you cannot slip firmly into a new life again. The only thing that can stop you from falling is the moment of your death. But nonetheless, one has to keep living until they die, so there was nothing to do but continue working diligently for your reward." You, one, and they all combine in a terribly awkward paragraph. I wondered whether this was just a lapse in writing or bad translation. And I also wondered whether the use of "they" is in the original Japanese or an intervention by the translator. Either way, it's beyond my modest skills to understand how this is good writing.

Kazu Mori ends up living homeless in a tent city in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. This is his story — his earlier lonely life working as a laborer away from home for years to support his family, the unbearable loss of his son and then his wife, the despair that drives him to run away and live rough, and his experiences in the tent city.There are flashes of poetic observation. This is definitely more of a literary tour de force than a novel. The lyrical passages have a way of falling into incoherence though. Perhaps I’m not sophisticated enough to appreciate this book — though I have loved most Japanese novels I’ve read, from The Tale of Genji to Convenience Store Woman.

The author goes all over the place , there is no real story, the only reason I finished this book it's because it's short. Very disappointed. Love Japanese lit , but this one you can skip