Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

This melancholy novel reads like a dream of hope and loss. Kazu wanders Tokyo's Ueno Park, recalling his life as a laborer and homeless man. "There may be an ending, but there is no end. I didn't live with intent, I only lived. But that's all over now."

Already dead when we meet him, Kazu watches himself on the first day he arrives on the Yamanote line at Ueno Station. From the park exit, you can see the grove of ginkgo trees where the homeless population grows and changes; some still in suits, trying to step into life again. Ueno restaurants often leave food packages at their back door, and in cherry viewing season, discarded groundsheets are handy to support shelters. Kazu listens to the conversations of commuters and the wishes of the faithful at the temple.

Kazu wasn't always homeless, recalling his poor family in the Hokkaido village where they harvested clams. He worked building for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by pickax and hand shovel, leaving his wife Setsuko to raise his son and daughter. Constantly sending money home, it was 20 years before he returned—for his only son's funeral—a stranger to his family. The Pure Land Buddhist ceremony invokes the Amida Buddha guiding his son to become reborn as a bodhisattva. From his father, he learns about his family history, and from homeless friends about Ueno Park's history—the 7,800 buried after the American bombing in 1945, and that it was formerly temple grounds. As he turns 60, it is now too dangerous for the 500 homeless who live in the park, the government evicting them to clean up for the 2020 Olympics. Things become so miserable, he forgets he was once part of a family. "I stood alone in the darkness. Light does not illuminate. It only looks for things to illuminate. And I had never been found by the light."

"Her antenna is tuned to the quietest voices" - The New York Times.

This meditative look at Tokyo's homeless completely draws the reader in. Kazu always felt 'unlucky', but I felt a hopeful spark within him. Any one could be in his place, and as desperate as he became, I still saw a peace, perhaps only in his belief that at the final moment a meaning would become clear. Quiet and haunting.

Tokyo Ueno Station won the National Book Award for translation in 2020.

2014 / Tradeback / 192 pages