MixedThe Japan TimesYu Miri connects Japan’s modern past with the homeless in Ueno Park, giving faces and voices to the dispossessed. In the manner of classic writers such as Emile Zola or Charles Dickens, the novel is a study of poverty, showing how places accumulate memory and become part of what we call the past ... Some of the past lands with a heavy hand, as characters launch into random speeches about Buddhist rituals or Japanese history. But the periods revisited are dramatic, such as the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, when almost 8,000 bodies were brought to the park and buried there. Likewise, a retelling of the Great Kanto Earthquake, the disaster of 1923, is alive with period detail ... At times, Tokyo Ueno Station seems one-dimensional in its focus on rain-soaked misery, like a lament in need of a variant. But as the Olympic Games return to Japan and the country invites new migrant labor from overseas, it is important to consider the cost of growth and the human labor that fuels it.
