Yikes. Tokyo Ueno Station is a beautiful book, but it’s also incredibly sad, much moreso than I was expecting (even though I went into it knowing it’s narrated by the ghost of a man who spent the last years of his life homeless in Tokyo’s Ueno Park). “I had no luck,” the narrator, Kazu, says, very early in the book, and as we learn about various episodes in his life via his memories, it’s hard to disagree. He’s from a poor family and is the eldest of eight siblings; he talks about leaving home at age 12 to work. Even when he’s older and has a wife and a family, he lives apart from them to earn money—he talks about having first come to Tokyo in 1963, and finding work in construction, building stadiums and such for the upcoming 1964 Summer Olympics. He works hard, and hardly knows his two kids, but that absence is nothing compared to the losses he experiences later (though it also makes those losses harsher).
The book alternates between Kazu’s memories of moments of his life (whether with his family or with other homeless people in the park, in his later years) and his ghost’s observations of various people around Ueno Park and Ueno Station. He listens to two older women on a park bench, looking at an old school photo and reminiscing about their classmates; he listens to another pair of older women in a museum, talking about their own family difficulties and not even looking at the art; he watches a young man in running clothes pay a visit to a temple in the park and read the prayers and wishes others have left there. He notices gingko trees and cherry blossoms and rain, and remembers those things from his life, too; he notices the park’s monuments and remembers how another homeless man, Shige, would always talk about different key events/moments in Japanese history. (This is one really satisfying thing about the book, the way that the space through which the narrative moves is so full of history and memory, both personal and national. Kazu himself notes that he was born the same year as the emperor, and that his son was born the same day as the emperor’s son, though obviously their experiences are nothing alike.)
Having read this, I’m curious about reading more of Yu Miri’s work—I learned in this interview on Electric Literature that this book is actually the fifth in a sequence of books involving the same subway line in Tokyo. But after what feels like a few too many sad books and movies lately (The Alpinist, I’m looking at you), I think I’ll need some lighter/happier reading first.
Leave a Reply