Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri translated by Morgan Giles

 

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri is the second book I've recently that has had a misleading cover. Bright colors! Big primary objects! Flowers! I assumed this would be about something like teenagers being annoying at a train station or parents complaining about their kids or the Japanese equivalent of a Boy Scout troop. I was wrong. Ahem.

Kazu is dead. He wanders around a homeless encampment by a train station telling the stories of the homeless, particularly his own story. His rootless upbringing, his negligence as a father and a husband, and how he ended up in this green space trying to make friends with a man whose only friend is a cat named Emile. You wonder about how his spirit ended up here and if it will ever be able to leave.

It's what I've come to think of as the Japanese style of bittersweet melancholy that will leave you feeling sad after just a few pages, but you're not really sure WHY you're so sad. I think of A Tale for the Time Being or Convenience Store Woman in the same way.  Those are both books that I end up thinking about all the time. Convenience Store Woman has even worked its way into my dreams on occasion. My husband and I spent some time imagining that Japanese culture is just so depressing right now that their literature just reflects that. 

It's a short read, just 180 tiny pages.  I'm not sure who should read this, but maybe we all should? It's weird to think about homelessness in Japan compared to that in the United States, but that doesn't seem to be the point the author is making. Is it about terrible things happening to good people? How if you don't have the "right" start in life you're doomed?  That people become invisible through no fault of their own?  I don't know. Maybe it's all of it. 

Just the beginning:

"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." (page 1)

"Each and every one with different minds, different faces, bodies, and hearts.

I know that, of course.

But seen from a distance, they all look just the same, or similar." (page 3)