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Book Reviewed by:A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations.
Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo.
Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics.
Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.
Excerpt
Tokyo Ueno Station
There's that sound again.
That sound-
I hear it.
But I don't know if it's in my ears or in my mind.
I don't know if it's inside me or outside.
I don't know when it was or who it was either.
Is that important?
Was it?
Who was it?
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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.
Left behind-
Like a sculpted tree on the vacant land where a rotted house has been torn down.
Like the water in a vase after wilted flowers have been removed.
Left behind.
But then what of me remains here?
A sense of tiredness.
I was always tired.
There was never a time I was not tired.
Not when life had its claws in me and not when I escaped from it.
I did not live with intent, I only lived.
But that's all over now.
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I watch ...
National Book Awards
2020
The presiding tone throughout is one of nostalgia and melancholy. This, coupled with crystalline prose, preserves a lightness of touch that makes the book a pleasure to read despite its often-upsetting subject matter. While there is certainly a sense of pathos that looms over everything, it is handled with sensitivity and nuance. As such, each moment of heartbreak seems earned by the author's thematic groundwork, rather than gratuitous or emotionally manipulative. By framing the story as she does, through the eyes of a uniquely omniscient and otherworldly narrator, Yu is able to evoke the personal, familial and national toll of poverty with equal fervor...continued
Full Review
(543 words)
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(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial
Tokyo Ueno Station is a dream: a chronicle of hope, loss, where we've been and where we're going. That Yu Miri could conjure so many realities simultaneously is nothing short of marvelous. The novel astounds, terrifies, and make the unseen concrete—entirely tangible and perennially effervescent, right there on the page. Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart
A radical and deeply felt work of fiction, psychogeography and history all at once, tapping us straight into the lifeblood of a Tokyo we rarely see: Tokyo from the margins, rooted in the city's most vulnerable and least visible lives - and deaths.Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station is told from the viewpoint of Kazu, a ghost who wanders the grounds of the train station in which he lived out his final years. Though the book makes unique use of this framing device to explore its particular themes of poverty and homelessness, it is certainly not the only novel to feature a narrator who relays their story from beyond the grave.
There are many reasons why an author may choose to employ this particular technique. Incorporating an element of the supernatural into an otherwise realistic story can instantly lend it a quietly magical, otherworldly tone and be used to heighten its impact. A ghostly narrator is uniquely removed from the rest of the novel's action. This allows them to serve as an ...
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