Excerpt from Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Enough." The word shot from the man who had appeared to be asleep; white smoke rose, slowly, from his mouth and nostrils. The cherry of the cigarette he held in his right hand looked like it would soon burn his fingers. Years of sweat and grime had changed the colors of his clothing beyond recognition, but with his tweed flat cap, checkered coat, and brown leather boots, he looked like an English huntsman.

A car climbed Yamashita-dri toward Uguisudani. The lights turned green, the signal for the visually impaired bleeped, and the people coming out of the station at the park exit started to cross the road toward us.

The man leaned forward at the sight of the people crossing the road-people with beautifully decorated homes-as if he were searching for the limits of his vision, and then, hand trembling, as though this gesture took all the strength he had left, he brought the cigarette up to his mouth to inhale-his beard more white than not-then exhaled as he put the thought behind him, spreading his aged fingers to drop the cigarette, snuffing out the embers with the toe of his faded boot.

Another man, sleeping with a large translucent bag of scavenged aluminum cans tucked between his legs, clutched a clear vinyl umbrella as if it were a cane.

A woman slept prone, using a maroon backpack as a futon and her arms as a pillow, her white hair tied up with a rubber band.

The faces had changed, and the numbers had gone down.

After the asset bubble burst, the population swelled and the park was so crowded with tarp huts that you could no longer see the grass, only the paths and facilities like bathrooms and kiosks.

Whenever a member of the imperial family was due to visit one of the park's museums or galleries, a mass eviction would occur; we would be forced to take down our tents and driven out of the park, and on returning after dark we would find new signs reading Lawn maintenance in progress-please keep off the grass, further restricting the space we could take.

Many of the homeless in Ueno Imperial Gift Park came from the northeast.

"The Gateway to the North"-during the postwar economic boom, young people from the northeast had taken overnight trains en masse to search for work in the capital, and Ueno was the place they disembarked. And when they went back home for the holidays with only the bags they could carry, Ueno was where they caught their trains.

Fifty years had passed; parents and siblings had died, and the family homes we should have returned to had disappeared for those of us who passed our days in this park.

The homeless people sitting on the concrete enclosure around the grove of ginkgo trees are all either sleeping or eating.

A man wearing a dark blue baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a khaki button-down shirt was eating a bento off the lap of his black trousers.

We never lacked for food.

There was an unspoken agreement with the many long-established restaurants in Ueno: after they closed for the night, many places did not lock their back doors. Inside, clearly set apart from the food waste, the unsold food would have been neatly portioned out and bagged.

Convenience stores, too, would put together bentos, sandwiches, and pastries past their best-before date in the area next to the dumpster, so if we went before the trash was collected, we could claim anything we wanted. When it was nice out, we had to eat the food right away, but when it was cold, we could keep it in our huts for days and heat it up on camping stoves.

Every Wednesday and Sunday, the Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall provided us with curry and rice; on Fridays it was the End of the Earth Mission Church; and on Saturdays the Missionaries of Charity distributed food. Missionaries of Charity was Mother Teresa's, and End of the Earth Mission Church was Korean. They had banners that read Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand and young girls with long hair who sang hymns and strummed guitars-women with frizzy perms stirring giant pots with ladles-homeless people would come from as far away as Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Asakusa, so often the line would be long, nearly five hundred strong. When the hymns and sermons were done with, they distributed the food. Kimchi rice with ham and cheese and sausage, rice and beans with yakisoba, sweet bread with coffee ... Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, praise the Lord's name, hallelujah, hallelujah-

Excerpted from Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri. Copyright © 2020 by Yu Miri. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.