... glorious ... Yu weaves her novel out of overheard conversations, radio and train announcements, intermittent memories of a life spent mostly away from family, glimpses of the park’s history. Giles’s translation is supple throughout. Kazu’s painstaking attention to those in the camp — their appearances, their hopes and disappointments — is perhaps a way to atone for the regret he feels for never being there for his wife and children while alive.
Don’t misunderstand this magical flourish; though often discomfitingly dreamlike, the book is a critique of damnably real power ... Despite the book’s surreal pitch, it’s capable of eliciting real feeling ... Why do some live for decades and others perish in their youth? Why are some born to inherit a throne, others destined to inhabit a shack? Miri’s novel is too fleet and elusive to offer an explanation, or maybe it’s just clever enough to understand there’s no real answer ... Though locked into the specific geography of one Tokyo park, the novel telescopes from the 17th century to the modern day. This will mean more to the reader with some grasp of that country’s history, but nevertheless the novel yields to those of us less versed in those particulars. Tokyo Ueno Station eloquently indicts the myth of Japan as an awesome power of cultural and economic might ... Though set in Japan, Tokyo Ueno Station is a novel of the world we all share — not what we expect from a ghost story but frightening all the same.
... a relatively slim novel that packs an enormous emotional punch, thanks to Yu's gorgeous, haunting writing and Morgan Giles' wonderful translation ... The circumstances behind Kazu's death are revealed late in the book, and they're almost unbearable to read. But while Yu's writing is unsparing, never letting the reader forget the enormities of poverty and loss, it's also quite beautiful, particularly when Kazu describes his current, liminal state ... Kazu's personal pain and his poverty are inextricable from each other, and Yu does a magnificent job exploring the effects of all kinds of loss on the human psyche. Tokyo Ueno Station is a stunning novel, and a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair.
... a strange conceit but one that works wonders, enabling the reader to fully sympathize with the ill-fated protagonist on each step of his tragic journey, from homeless man to restless spirit ... Kazu’s Job-like suffering is heart-rending. Mercifully, his tale is not so bleak that it is off-putting. His catalog of hardships serves a purpose, laying bare perennial social concerns such as the seismic gulf between Japan’s rich and poor. Yu underscores that inequality by having Kazu born in 1933, the same year as Emperor Akihito, and showing how both lives loosely dovetail and wildly diverge. There is additional color, vibrancy and insight as Kazu’s spectral self haunts his old stamping ground, eavesdropping on conversations and reminiscing about absent friends and other lost souls ... Morgan Giles’ skillful translation from the Japanese brings out dark strains but also pockets of beauty ... a devastating and affecting novel which illuminates a swath of society subsisting on the margins.
Yū Miri brings the periphery of tragedy into focus in dreamy, kaleidoscopic visions, intertwining Kazu’s past, the history of Ueno Park, and the state of modern Japanese society. Tokyo Ueno Station is a shattered mirror of prose, made of misshapen shards that don’t always connect but together reflect an image of a lost life and inevitable misfortune ... As Kazu’s story is unearthed, the prelude poem becomes imbued and enriched by the melancholic life it represents ... Rather than solely exploring what it means to suffer at the hand of fate, Miri asks how that must feel in a world where those in power coexist in seemingly uncaring prosperity with the powerless ... By weaving the park’s history into the narrative, Miri successfully evolves the setting of the novel into a character in its own right. Ueno Park arises from the background as a complement to Kazu’s character—a partner in pain, a sympathetic place to rest his head ... The intertwining of narrative styles can be disorienting at times. Though the novel is technically told from Kazu’s first-person perspective, his voice often dissolves into the background in favor of a history lesson from Shige or an observational perspective of present-day Ueno Park ... Translated by Morgan Giles from Miri’s original Japanese, the voice of the English text has a certain vague, indistinct quality to it. Though the novel begins with a tangible first-person narration, that voice and its personality become diluted in descriptions of mundane activity around Ueno Park and its history. Even when the first person style returns to the forefront, some phrases feel distinctly non-idiomatic ... It’s possible that Giles chose to favor linguistic accuracy over literary embellishment, the former being a formidable challenge in and of itself. And that is not to say that there aren’t some standout quotes in this translation as well ... Miri is experimenting, abandoning a more defined narrative structure and style for something more poetic, loose-fitting, and juxtaposing. One loses track of the distinct and disjointed pieces and instead perceives the poignant whole, the tragic story of a man living under one of the many blue tents of Ueno Park.
... a social novel, but in more of a magical than a strictly realist sense. History can’t be reduced to dates on the calendar, but is grasped at elliptically. The text is full of line breaks, as if with each new paragraph Kazu is making a new attempt to understand the past, and with every new line it slips further away. The past and its inhabitants are untouchable, like Kazu himself in his spectral state ... How Kazu comes to be homeless, and then to haunt the park, is what keeps us reading, trying to understand the tragedy of this ghostly everyman. Deftly translated by Morgan Giles, the novel most effectively conveys its concerns through dense layers of narrative, through ambiguity rather than specific fates. It is an urgent reminder of the radical divide between rich and poor in postwar Japan. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics just around the corner, the reader is urged to think about which kinds of endurance will be celebrated, and which will continue to be ignored.
As Tokyo once again gears up to host the Olympic Games in 2020, this novel is a pertinent intervention. Yu makes it clear that the denizens of Ueno Park are not homogeneously evil, they are just disadvantaged. Yu shows intellectuals, unemployed salarymen and divorcees, namely people like us, living among the tarp-and-cardboard population. In this way she makes it clear we are all only one slip away from joining them.
... lays bare the depth of sorrow for those society deems too pitiable to even see. While the poignancy of the novel is palpable, its refusal to look away actually softens the blow, as there is little joy to weigh it against. Still, Tokyo Ueno Station is a beautiful look at life too often unobserved, and one whose resonance only seems to grow by the day ... The greatest strength of the novel is how well it leverages its construction to convey empathy. Reading Miri’s book almost feels like being taught a memory. She delicately weaves between Kazu’s observations in the present, the memories of his difficult life, and his musings about others and the world around him. Even though Kazu is somewhat detached towards others, he is a thoughtful and caring person, and the glimpses into his mind go a long way towards illuminating that. Miri has an innate ability to convey the experience of memory, in a way that reminds me of Ishiguro’s somber novels. The translation by Giles sings as well, even faced with difficult passages such as the teachings of a Buddhist priest and Shige’s historical monologues ... the novel’s prime weakness is that in its tenacity towards showing the pain Kazu has experienced, there’s little room left for joy ... It’s difficult to point to any singular moments of happiness in the novel; instead, readers are left to weigh their own experiences against Kazu’s to feel the depth of his sorrow. No life is without some happiness, but even Kazu’s brief retirement with his granddaughter is downplayed. This shrinks the range of emotions on display. The effect is still powerful, but perhaps no one has shown how breathtaking a contrary moment can be than Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day ... an evocative and moving book. Miri’s skills are on full display, as emotionally resonant in moments as intimate as a conversation and as large as a lifetime. Over only a few lines, Miri is able to make you feel the full loss of a life unknown not only to us, but to his absent father in Kazu. In the time since reading it, I’ve felt its resonance grow in my mind. As people worldwide are listening to the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged in a new way, Miri has shown us that we all have a lot to learn, and a long way to go.
... brief, moving, poetic ... Time collapses in this novel, with the present, past and historical past interwoven. There is a mesmerizing, wavelike tumult and calm in the story’s movement.
Yu is no stranger to modern society’s traps driven by nationalism, capitalism, classism, sexism. Her anglophoned latest (gratitude to translator Giles for providing fluent accessibility) is a surreal fable of splintered families, disintegrating relationships, and the casual devaluation of humanity.
... testifies to the breadth and depth of [Miri's] research and commitment to telling the stories of both the homeless community in Ueno Park and from Tōhoku ... The book is full of sounds of other people’s voices, which translator Morgan Giles renders sensitively and inventively in English ... the novel unravels the myth of Japan’s homogeneity and encourages readers to see how Japanese society deals with differences, including those habitually concealed.
Yu 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.
... coolly meditative, subtly spectral ... Yu’s spare, empathetic prose beautifully expresses Kazu’s perspective on the passage of time ... This slim but sprawling tale finds a deeply sympathetic hero in a man who feels displaced and longs for connection after it’s too late.
... it’s soon clear in this brief, piercing novel that Kazu is circling around a series of heartbreaks, and when Yu finally hits on them, the novel gains a pathos and focus that justify its more abstract and lyrical early passages ... more restrained and mature ... A gemlike, melancholy novel infused with personal and national history.
