Tokyo Ueno Station

I don’t get the hype (National Book Award Winner, NYT Notable Book)? It’s just the story of an incredibly boring guy, who spends his life working away from his home town to support his family, but (spoilers?) when first his son dies at age twenty-one, followed several years later by the death of his wife, he gives up on life and becomes homeless in a park in Tokyo, where he eventually dies as well, only for his “spirit” to wander the park, listening to several banal conversations of the living passing through. Because all the characters are so flat and uninteresting, the book feels overly distant. It also seemed to me that a surprisingly large amount of the text is spent naming cities or areas the main character travels to, or streets he wanders down – names that have little resonance to somebody not especially familiar with Japan? The best thing about the book is definitely the cover, which I will admit, is quite beautiful.

\”Tokyo Ueno Station\” by Yu Miri with poetic translation by Morgan Giles reveals a common theme in my reading choices: do not read the flap because the author wants to reveal their secrets gradually. You will also receive a boost if you read up on Japanese history because the fantastical elements of literature enable the protagonist to float in and out of the most significant moments in a century of Japan as we know it. First off, the author makes the intriguing choice to have no chapters. Things keep moving in a surrealist fashion, and we learn more about Japan than we ever imagined. The American Firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 does not exist in the average American\’s consciousness, for example. Miri endures all of this while coming to grips with the mortality of those around him, including his children. Just as Japanese culture remains underrepresented in our minds, Buddhism\’s traditions remain a mystery to most of us. Proper reading of a bodhisattva, a person who could \”pass on\” to the next level but remains to help those who suffer in this world, provides a new perspective to mourning. When they go back and forth between the political and personal, you start to wonder what is going on in the other storyline. I expected that the spoiled identity of the narrator would ruin parts of the story. Still, I enjoyed the narrator\’s humanity as he reminisces with \”residents\” of the train station to show how much life can weigh on us. It takes on a very stream-of-consciousness approach, which answers many questions about the afterlife as the author sees it while showing how eternity may not have some of the perks that we envision. The story meanders into its best territory with meditations on what it means to have no home in Japan and how we manage to take away from people who already have so little. How did they get there? How would they absorb the normal tragedies that take place around them? As with most literature problems, the writer chooses to inform you through exposure without asserting any answers.

One of the more interesting books I\’ve read this year. It was a book club recommendation, and I would not have stumbled across it otherwise. I plan to read more from this author. So refreshing to start reading outside of mainstream crap in the U.S. Really enriches a larger worldview and understanding of different places and peoples.

This was a required book for one of my literature classes and I believe my professor made an excellent choice. This novel discusses the impacts of disaster on modern Japan and the way different people remain ignorant to the experience of others. I’m not sure what the original Japanese version is like, but the English is easy to read and provides details I would have never expected out of a first person novel. If you like understanding the hardships of others through fiction, I believe this one allows for readers to begin to understand the difficulties of homelessness not only in Japan, but elsewhere too. It reminded me deeply of a homeless encampment near my current home that gets driven away when politicians visit.

I had to read this stream-of-consciousness novel twice for the full flavor of this dark yet poetic narrative that reminds me of MRS DALLOWAY more than any other novel I ever read (and I had to read that one several times–though I was only 15 then). Perhaps the best means of entry into the fullness of the protagonist Kazu\’s narrative is the telling line: \”The calendar separates today from yesterday and tomorrow, but in life there is no distinguishing past, present, and future.\” The reader quickly learns that Kazu\’s life has been unremarkable and seamed with loss until he ends up, or sets out, as a homeless senior in Ueno Park. On his peregrinations through the park, he reports the conversations of strangers as if their chatter has the same value to his life as his reflections on his own experiences with family, work, and society. The narrative somersaults through Kazu\’s memory of personal events and his sensory perceptions in the landscape of Japanese historical events from imperial births to battles to tsunamis. This fractured (perhaps fractal) narrative, though short, is not easy to comprehend in one read. My first read valued the novel as a representation of modern Japanese culture from a unique perspective. Some elements struck me as consistent with contemporary western ways and some were radically eye-opening–funeral rites for example. Only the second read opened my eyes and mind to the complexity of the narrative and Miri Yu\’s linguistic artistry.

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