Tokyo Ueno Station

“Suffering is the one promise life keeps.” This is a sentiment David Mitchell expresses in his current novel, “Utopia Avenue.” It applies in spades to Yu Miri’s dreamlike novel, TOKYO UENO STATION, in which she takes a clear-eyed look at the gulf between the haves and have-nots in postwar Japan. Kazu, her protagonist/narrator, is a Job-like figure. He seems fated to a life of struggle and despair; a life he can’t even escape after death. Following a life of hard work and poverty, marked by separation from his family and the mysterious death of his son at age 21, he finally retires to his home in Fukushima. Shortly thereafter, his wife also passes away mysteriously in her sleep. In an effort to avoid being a burden to his show more granddaughter, Kazu returns to a life of homelessness in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.

This place plays a key role in the novel. It is a piece of land given to the people by their Emperor. It was the site of famous battles, a place of refuge following the 1923 earthquake and the American firebombing of Tokyo during WWII. Today it has museums, a zoo, numerous memorial statues, and a mass grave honoring the people who died there. Just across the street sits Ueno Train Station. This is significant to Kazu’s story because it is the gateway to the capital from the northern province where he lived. The station also is the perennial disembarkation point for people from the North seeking work in the city. Like Kazu, many end up homeless, once again seeking sanctuary in this iconic park.

Yu’s non-linear stream-of-consciousness narrative largely relies on what Kazu sees and hears, but also congers his memories in flashbacks. To these, she adds park history as told by Shige, Kazu’s homeless friend. Notwithstanding its poetic structure, Yu’s narrative structure can be disorienting. Also, the mood is ceaselessly dark. However, she masterfully uses it to portray what it is like to be homeless in Japan today. The government tolerates the encampment only when it doesn’t conflict with a cleaner image it wants to convey, like during an imperial visit. The government never communicates directly with these poor souls, but instead posts terse signs. The city people ignore the homeless or pretend they just aren’t there. Worst of all, Kazu is made to feel that he deserves his sad fate primarily because he has always been poor. Poverty and struggle are inextricable for him. Yu uses rain as a motif to show Kazu’s struggle, especially when there is no shelter. His wife tells him, “You never did have any luck, did you?” And after seeing the Emperor pass by, Kazu observes that he had “a life that had never known struggle, envy or aimlessness, one that had lived the same 73 years as I had.” show less

What a book! It was not at all what I expected when I bought a book about a haunted train station, but it was so much better. there are many stories of men who have suffered bad luck, who were born into poverty and suffered one loss after another. I found this one exceptional for a number of reasons. One was how thoroughly it painted a picture of its main setting, from the plant life to the buildings and businesses to the people to the issues of its governance. And second was the mindset of the narrator, Kazu, who certainly feels his many losses, but who continues to go on doing what he feels to be the right or responsible thing, never wanting to be a burden on anyone else, even after spending decades laboring to support family members show more that he rarely saw.

Exceeded my expectations. show less

‘’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.’’

Our journey starts in a park near Ueno Station as Tokyo is preparing to host the 2020 Olympics. A voice is heard above the buzzing streets of the metropolis, a voice whispering of misfortune, failed hopes, injustice and death. A voice from a ghost for Kazu is dead, one of the many hopeless residents of the park. Now, he becomes our guide to the stormy history of Japan through the ages, the social unrest, show more the changes and the expectation of an uncertain future.

‘’I was always lost at a point in the past which never could go anywhere now it had gone, but has time ended? Has it just stopped? Will it someday rewind and start again? Or will I be shut out from time for eternity? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’’

Kazu is desperate for a sense of existence. He has been struggling with the ordeals that Fate and humans threw in his way and now he doesn’t know whether he even belongs with the dead. Eavesdropping the daily conversations of the visitors of the park, observing the homeless, he returns to the land of the living and his own life. Linked to the Imperial family through a series of random events, he comments on the futility of being a servant of the state and takes us on a journey within the disputes and changes that shaped the history of Japan. In a park where every tree has a plastic tag attached to its trunk, he is reminded of the fact that everything belongs to the Emperor. What a title, though, in a world where every ‘’empire’’ has fallen to pieces!

‘’One cannot tell when or where each rose is blooming, whether it is in a garden or a flowerpot; whether it is sunny, or cloudy, or raining; whether it is morning, or noon, or night, whether it is spring, or summer, or autumn.’’

Kazu has physically lost all sense of the world around him, yet his perception is more acute than ever. His memories are a tapestry of poverty and struggle in a country that has fallen apart due to its actions during the Second World War and the atrocities it has committed. Hit by the constant rain that reminds him of the ultimate nightmare, the loss of his son, the rituals of death performed in a society chocked by industrialization and the dark presence of nuclear power plants. The roses have lost their colours and their perfume and moments of cruelty are always present.

Hidden behind a beautiful, powerful front cover, lies a bitter observation of a society that has changed, a society that is supposed to have learnt from the past. But has it? To what result? And to what end?

‘’We all have an enormity of time, too big for one person to deal with, and we live, and we die.’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

‘I was always lost at a point in the past that would never go anywhere now that it had gone, but has time ended? Has it just stopped? Will it someday rewind and start again? Or will I be shut out from time for eternity? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’

This is a hauntingly beautiful, desperately elegiac, and quietly angry novel from Yu Miri. The pervading sense of melancholy and the stark lyricism of the prose makes her story of Kazu a sweeping study of a nation and its history. Here, Kazu - who we discover quite soon in to the book is a spirit or ghost – watches those among whom he used to mix, the busy crowds of shoppers and residents, and the homeless, gathered together in the park in their make-shift shelters. show more As the book travels forwards and back in time we learn Kazu’s personal story as it becomes intertwined with the development of Japan, and Tokyo in particular, after World War 2. He had travelled to the city for work, leaving his wife and family, and then personal tragedies leave him homeless and rootless in Tokyo. The very heart of the book, literally and metaphorically, is the loss of his son Koichi and how this impacts on his life. Their lives are superimposed on the lives of the Imperial family; Kazu was born in the same year as Emperor Akihito, and his son on the very same day as his successor, Naruhito. As the homeless are periodically cleared out of the park, sometimes when the Imperial family are visiting nearby, later as the Olympic committees visit to choose Tokyo as host city for 2020, the difference in status could not be clearer.

Kazu’s spiritual existence seems to be some sort of limbo and, as the novel concludes, we are left with a strong suggestion for his cause of death, and hence a reason why he has been left this way. He drifts in and out of conversations, hearing snatches of talk between people as they go about their daily business. The general air of melancholy is matched by the weather, where it always seems to be raining, and the gentle falling of the cherry blossom, suggestive of so much in Japanese culture. The prose itself is simple, with oftentimes a haiku-like compactness of imagery from the very beginning:
‘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.’

The park itself becomes a focus of our attention, being the place where so much of its history is the history of the city, from the fire-bombing in 1945 to previous earthquakes and disasters. It is a place of refuge, but also the place of death, and the tide of people and the transient homeless population are the modern inheritors of the place. Kazu’s life is the story of modern Tokyo and Japan; from the 1964 Olympics to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Kazu is some sort of everyman figure leading us as he tries to find some sort of redemption. His journey, our journey, is his way of working back through his life to the moment of his death, in an effort to find some meaning and a conclusion.

Profound and haunting, this is a book that will stay with me for some time, I think. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but bear with it and it will reward you. A personal journey that becomes a wider, cultural exploration, this is an important work that gives a voice to the unheard in a quietly devastating way. 5 stars. show less

Man, this was so sad!
The narrator is a ghost exploring and explaining his life in the Ueno Station homeless encampment. Originally a marginalised worker who spent most of time away from home, he loses his son unexpectedly and despite acknowledging he doesn't have a strong relationship with his children, he takes this loss hard. Later he is able to reconcile his relationship with his wife and spends some years at home until he loses her as well. While living with a caring granddaughter, he decides he no longer wants to be a burden and moves to Tokyo to the homeless encampment. The encampment is affected by the development due to the oncoming Olympics.
Having been to Japan recently this really hit home. There was a lot of Buddhist wisdom show more and customs with things I saw well explained. While in Hiroshima we also came in contact with some homeless people who politely asked us for donations.
The extreme cultural expectations of workload, pride and face come into play here.
While this book was sad, it was beautifully written and translated. show less

This is quite a strange story, in that our protagonist/narrator, Kazu, is dead.   Before Kazu died, he was homeless and living in a cardboard and tarpaulin hut in Ueno Park, right next to Tokyo Ueno Station.

All too often we are shown the shiny-shiny capitalist face of Tokyo that those in power wish us to see, the Olympics, etc., but never do we see, or hear, those who are cast aside, unwanted and unneeded by a system that some just can't keep up with.   Tokyo Ueno Station is their story, told by a ghost of one of the many people that society has no place for any more.

I know it sounds all rather depressing, but i didn't find it so because it's a view of Tokyo that is told in such a unique and interesting way, keeping our attention when show more most writers would have lost it, making us realise, consider and re-revaluate.   How many homeless people die on the streets every year and no one ever gets to hear their story, or realise the truth as to why they were homeless in the first place, this book makes you think about those things: they are important.

It's certainly a fact in the UK, where i live, that the government deliberately maintains a homeless population in order to keep the threat in front of people of what will happen to them if they don't comply with society's demands.   I presume this is the same in Japan:   "Do you want to end up like them, Salaryman?   Well you'd best work hard, do lots of overtime, and do as you're told -- or else you'll be living in Ueno Park too!" show less