Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
review – haunting novel of life after death
A ‘strange place’: Ueno Park, Tokyo. Photograph: Masayuki Yamashita//Alamy
An elliptical examination of the divisions between rich and poor in contemporary Japan
Lauren Elkin
Wed 3 Apr 2019
“This park’s a rather strange place,” says one character in Yu Miri’s novel about a homeless man who haunts a Tokyo park after his death at the nearby metro station. Ueno Imperial Gift park – given to the people by their emperor in 1924 – is situated at what was once known as the “demon’s gate” to the city for its unlucky north-eastern location. It features a famous market, museums and a zoo. It is also, judging by Yu’s novel, home to many spirits, living and dead.
Yu is no stranger to ghosts. An award-winning Korean-Japanese author, she moved to Fukushima after the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident of March 2011. It is a haunted region, as Richard Lloyd Parry shows in his 2017 book Ghosts of the Tsunami: the stories of the people who live there and the people they lost amount to a collective psychic break with reality, a trauma too severe to assimilate.
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Yu’s novel takes a more poetic approach to similar terrain. Kazu is a Fukushima-born labourer whose life intersects with that of the imperial family: he and Emperor Akihito are both born in 1933, and their sons are born on the same day in 1960. “What a blessing,” the midwife says of his son’s birth on such an auspicious day; such blessings are revealed to be hollow and meaningless. These links throw into relief the discrepancy between their lives; Kazu can only find work away from his family, harvesting in northern Hokkaido, then building the stadium to be used in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He misses seeing his children grow up, and only begins a daily life with his wife when he retires, which is soon cut short by tragedy.
Tokyo Ueno Station is a social novel, but in more of a magical than a strictly realist sense. History can’t be reduced to dates on the calendar, but is grasped at elliptically. The text is full of line breaks, as if with each new paragraph Kazu is making a new attempt to understand the past, and with every new line it slips further away. The past and its inhabitants are untouchable, like Kazu himself in his spectral state: “I can no longer touch,” he observes. “Noises, colours and smells are all mixed up, gradually fading away, shrinking; I feel if I put out my finger to touch it, everything will disappear.”
How Kazu comes to be homeless, and then to haunt the park, is what keeps us reading, trying to understand the tragedy of this ghostly everyman. Deftly translated by Morgan Giles, the novel most effectively conveys its concerns through dense layers of narrative, through ambiguity rather than specific fates. It is an urgent reminder of the radical divide between rich and poor in postwar Japan. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics just around the corner, the reader is urged to think about which kinds of endurance will be celebrated, and which will continue to be ignored.
• Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles, is published by Tilted Axis (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
A ‘strange place’: Ueno Park, Tokyo. Photograph: Masayuki Yamashita//AlamyAn elliptical examination of the divisions between rich and poor in contemporary Japan
Lauren Elkin
Wed 3 Apr 2019
“This park’s a rather strange place,” says one character in Yu Miri’s novel about a homeless man who haunts a Tokyo park after his death at the nearby metro station. Ueno Imperial Gift park – given to the people by their emperor in 1924 – is situated at what was once known as the “demon’s gate” to the city for its unlucky north-eastern location. It features a famous market, museums and a zoo. It is also, judging by Yu’s novel, home to many spirits, living and dead.
Yu is no stranger to ghosts. An award-winning Korean-Japanese author, she moved to Fukushima after the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident of March 2011. It is a haunted region, as Richard Lloyd Parry shows in his 2017 book Ghosts of the Tsunami: the stories of the people who live there and the people they lost amount to a collective psychic break with reality, a trauma too severe to assimilate.
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Yu’s novel takes a more poetic approach to similar terrain. Kazu is a Fukushima-born labourer whose life intersects with that of the imperial family: he and Emperor Akihito are both born in 1933, and their sons are born on the same day in 1960. “What a blessing,” the midwife says of his son’s birth on such an auspicious day; such blessings are revealed to be hollow and meaningless. These links throw into relief the discrepancy between their lives; Kazu can only find work away from his family, harvesting in northern Hokkaido, then building the stadium to be used in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He misses seeing his children grow up, and only begins a daily life with his wife when he retires, which is soon cut short by tragedy.
Tokyo Ueno Station is a social novel, but in more of a magical than a strictly realist sense. History can’t be reduced to dates on the calendar, but is grasped at elliptically. The text is full of line breaks, as if with each new paragraph Kazu is making a new attempt to understand the past, and with every new line it slips further away. The past and its inhabitants are untouchable, like Kazu himself in his spectral state: “I can no longer touch,” he observes. “Noises, colours and smells are all mixed up, gradually fading away, shrinking; I feel if I put out my finger to touch it, everything will disappear.”
How Kazu comes to be homeless, and then to haunt the park, is what keeps us reading, trying to understand the tragedy of this ghostly everyman. Deftly translated by Morgan Giles, the novel most effectively conveys its concerns through dense layers of narrative, through ambiguity rather than specific fates. It is an urgent reminder of the radical divide between rich and poor in postwar Japan. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics just around the corner, the reader is urged to think about which kinds of endurance will be celebrated, and which will continue to be ignored.
• Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles, is published by Tilted Axis (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
A Painful Past And Ghostly Present Converge In 'Tokyo Ueno Station'
June 27, 20207:00 AM ET
MICHAEL SCHAUB
Tokyo Ueno Station, by Yu Miri
Riverhead Books
Kazu, the narrator of Tokyo Ueno Station, had hoped that his death would bring him some rest, some sense of closure. The man led a life marked with hard work and intense pain; he spent his final years homeless, living in a makeshift shelter in a Tokyo park. But when he dies, he finds the afterlife — such as it is — is nothing like he expected.
"I thought that once I was dead, I would be reunited with the dead," he reflects. "I thought something would be resolved by death ... But then I realized that I was back in the park. I was not going anywhere, I had not understood anything, I was still stunned by the same numberless doubts, only I was now outside life looking in, as someone who has lost the capacity to exist, now ceaselessly thinking, ceaselessly feeling --"
Kazu's painful past and ghostly present are the subject of Tokyo Ueno Station, the latest book by Korean-Japanese author Yu Miri to be published in English. It's a relatively slim novel that packs an enormous emotional punch, thanks to Yu's gorgeous, haunting writing and Morgan Giles' wonderful translation.
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The novel follows Kazu as he observes the park where he used to live with hundreds of other homeless people. "Before, we had families," Kazu explains. "We had houses. Nobody starts off life in a hovel made of cardboard and tarps, and nobody becomes homeless because they want to be." Kazu listens in on conversations between the park's residents as well as other people who walk by it and the nearby train station.
Through flashbacks, the reader learns of Kazu's earlier years. He grew up in poverty in Fukushima, and worked harvesting kelp and rice before finding work in construction that took him away from his wife, son and daughter: "I think if one were to count all the days I had spent with my wife, Setsuko, after thirty-seven years of marriage with me mainly away from home, they would not even add up to a year."
Kazu's life is rocked when his son dies at 21, and after yet another tragedy, he moves to Tokyo for good, living in the park, finding odd jobs to earn enough money to eat. The government, however, regularly shoos the residents out of the park, which forces the homeless people to live in a state of constant fear: "We were always on edge, dogged by danger and the anxiety that if we had something even for a moment, it could be taken away."
The circumstances behind Kazu's death are revealed late in the book, and they're almost unbearable to read. But while Yu's writing is unsparing, never letting the reader forget the enormities of poverty and loss, it's also quite beautiful, particularly when Kazu describes his current, liminal state: "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."
... while Yu's writing is unsparing, never letting the reader forget the enormities of poverty and loss, it's also quite beautiful
Tokyo Ueno Station is a mournful book, but it's an angry one as well. In one scene, Kazu recalls how his parents would send their young children to answer the door when debt collectors came and tell them their mother and father weren't home. "I thought what a thing of sin poverty was, that there could be nothing more sinful than forcing a small child to lie," he thinks. "The wages of that sin were poverty, a wage that one could not endure, leading one to sin again, and as long as one could not pull oneself out of poverty, the cycle would repeat until death."
Yu emphasizes the unfairness of poverty with some painful contrasts. Kazu's son was born on the same day as the emperor of Japan's son; their lives, of course, turn out quite differently. And one of Kazu's first construction jobs was working on athletic facilities that were being built for the 1965 Tokyo Olympics, while he and his fellow homeless people are forced to leave their park when the city is attempting to impress visitors in a bid to host the 2020 Olympics.
Kazu's personal pain and his poverty are inextricable from each other, and Yu does a magnificent job exploring the effects of all kinds of loss on the human psyche. Tokyo Ueno Station is a stunning novel, and a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair. "Light does not illuminate," Kazu reflects at one point. "It only looks for things to illuminate. And I had never been found by the light. I would always be in darkness --"
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