Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)
Books | Fiction / Family Life / General
3
Yu Miri
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATUREA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARA 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.
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More Details:
Author
Yu Miri
Pages
192
Publisher
Penguin
Published Date
2021-06-22
ISBN
0593187520 9780593187524
Community ReviewsSee all
"Kazu's life has similarities to the elite family of the Japanese emperor. They're born in 1933, and they both had a son born on the same day. What is the big difference? Kazu's family is poor. <br/><br/>He spends much of his life away from home working and sending most of the money to his family, but they're just getting by. He works so much that he misses his kids growing up, spending time with them and his children, parents, and wife. What's his reward for all this? Homelessness in his last days. <br/><br/>We see this story unfold after Kazu's death. He's a ghost haunting Tokyo's Ueno Station. In his later days, he's also a ghost. He's living in a tent in the park across from Ueno Station and he and his neighbors are treated as invisible, until there's a park restoration or a dignitary visits, then they're forced to move, seen only for being a hindrance. Sometimes, there is plenty of notice to find a new place to stay and other times not.<br/><br/>The imagery in this book is phenomenal. The sights, the sounds, the darkness as the rain falls, the smell of said rain. The emotion is there, too, as Kazu laments not seeing his kids more. The loneliness he feels as a homeless man and a widower. The grief and sadness he feels with each loss and catastrophe he faces. This book is by no means a happy book, but it definitely raises important issues with how the homeless are treated."
C H
Chris Hicks
