Tokyo Ueno Station - by Rebecca Hussey
This passage appears on the first page of Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles:
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.
That this is spoken by a ghost makes sense: our narrator, Kazu, has reached an ending but not found an end. Kazu spent the last part of his life living unhoused, among other unhoused people, in and around Ueno Park and train station. He died and is now haunting the place, watching strangers and keeping an eye out for friends.
Gradually he fills in details of his life: he was born in poverty in Fukushima and spent his whole life trying to survive. After finishing elementary school, he left home to take a job as a fisherman, the start of a series of jobs that kept him away from home and family. He married and had two children but found work in Tokyo, and so hardly ever saw them back in Fukushima.
His life was full of struggle and a lot of bad luck. He was born in 1933, the same year as Akihito, who would later become emperor. His son Koichi was born in 1960, the same year the crown prince was born. In contrast with the royal family, for him everything was difficult. Koichi’s birth was long and dangerous, and, we learn early on, he died at age 21. Kazu’s description of Koichi’s funeral rites is heartbreaking. Kazu mourns never having known his son, but he had little choice: he had to take work where he could find it to survive. The story of how he comes to Ueno Station where he will live the rest of his life among the homeless is also intensely sad.
The novel’s portrait of inequality and class struggle is powerful, and so is its setting — the details of the park and station have remained with me. But what I return to most often when I think about this book is the novel’s loose, rambling structure. I’m not referring to how the narrative moves back in forth in time, although it does do that a lot, but rather how it is full of what feel like digressions as Kazu records conversations he remembers and overhears. As a ghost, Kazu observes people in the park and records their everyday exchanges about shopping and family. These conversations are long enough that their inclusion comes to seem odd. There are also a lot of scenes where Kazu remembers conversations he had with his friend Shige. The two of them spent a lot of time together in Ueno Park looking at and talking about statues and monuments, and Shige recounts stories from Japanese history at length.
This structure feels a little awkward, but in a way that seems intentional. For one, the conversations with Shige show how enmeshed in history Yu Miri’s characters are — and we all are. Not only does Kazu’s life parallel that of Emperor Akihito’s, but it is framed by the Olympic games: Kazu’s first job in Tokyo is helping to prepare for the 1964 Olympics, and by the time he has died and we meet him as a ghost, Japan is bidding to host the 2020 games. That he comes from Fukushima, site of the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, is no coincidence. History haunts him — and he, as a ghost in the park, haunts history.
I think the structure also captures the feeling of life for those people living in tents in the park. They spend their days amongst other, more privileged people listening to conversations that give glimpses into lives very different from their own. They are vulnerable, lacking the ability to erect stable barriers between themselves and others. Their lives are permeable; they have no retreat. They can be forced out of what little protection they have at any time with no notice. At one point, the park’s homeless residents are forced to pack their things and get them out of the way — somewhere — for an unstated reason. Later, Kazu learns that the emperor and empress would be visiting the park, and city officials did not want them to witness the homeless encampments. They are merely an eyesore, to be brushed aside so the powerful don’t feel distress upon seeing them. It’s no wonder, then, that Kazu’s narrative is full of the bodies and speeches of others; they wander through his story as they wandered through his life.
I also think Yu Miri is trying to make her book a little more like life than like other books. Returning to the quotation above from the novel’s first page, life isn’t like a book, but books don’t have to be like (what we expect from) books either. They don’t have to have plot, or careful pacing of events. They can capture life’s weird rhythms, or lack of rhythms. They can capture our strange experiences of time:
That day — time has passed. Time has ended. But that time is scattered here and there like spilled pushpins. As I am unable to take my eyes away from that glance at sadness, all I can do is suffer —
Time does not pass.
Time never ends.
The elements of this novel are “scattered here and there like spilled pushpins,” allowing us to experience as we read how Kazu feels about and remembers his life.
I say this novel is trying to be life-like, but it’s a novel narrated by a ghost! That doesn’t really matter, though; Kazu speaking from old age wouldn’t be much different from the Kazu of the novel who speaks from death. Kazu as ghost, however, underscores the point that “time never ends.” The past is always with us, always haunting us, like memorials in the park, there to be remembered if we choose to pay attention.
New books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below from the publisher:
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton (Fitzcarraldo Editions): I’m a little confused about the publishing status of this one, as a hardcover edition is coming out from Liveright next March, but Fitzcarraldo Editions is publishing their paperback edition in the U.S. now. At any rate, this book sounds fascinating, and I may read it soon: “Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of Sado at the age of twenty-one and on her journey to becoming a literary translator.”
Forty Lost Years by Rosa Maria Arquimbau, translated by Peter Bush (Fum d'Estampa Press, originally published in 1971): “Forty Lost Years tells the captivating story of Laura Vidal, a working-class woman who becomes a high-fashion dressmaker to the bourgeois ladies of Barcelona during Franco's dictatorship.”
I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir by Jan Grue, translated by B.L. Crook (FSG Originals): “Jan Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three. Shifting between specific periods of his life…he intersperses these histories with elegant, astonishingly wise reflections on the world, social structures, disability, loss, relationships, and the body.”
Real Estate: A Living Autobiography by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury): This is the third installment of Levy’s autobiographical series. I loved the first two, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, and am so excited for the third, “an exhilarating, boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it.”
New books acquired:
Dead Girls by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 2020): I loved Almada’s book The Wind That Lays Waste and wrote about it here. This novel “narrates the case of three small-town teenage girls murdered in the 1980's in the interior of Argentina.”
Notes from Childhood by Norah Lange, translated by Charlotte Whittle (And Other Stories, 2021, originally published in 1937): “A series of luminous vignettes describe the childhood of Argentina's rediscovered modernist writer.”
Gallery of Clouds by Rachel Eisendrath (New York Review of Books, 2021): “the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds.” A book about Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia might not sound like something you or I want to read, but people I trust have assured me otherwise.
Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture by Anaïs Duplan (Black Ocean, 2020): this is a book of criticism about “the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility.”
(S)Kinfolk: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah by Tochi Onyebuchi (Fiction Advocate, 2021): this book is part of a series called Afterwords from the publisher Fiction Advocate that consists of short books of creative literary criticism. I love this idea!
Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):
The Wanting Was a Wilderness by Alden Jones (Fiction Advocate, 2020): this is another installment in the Afterwords series mentioned above, this time about Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir.
Corregidora by Gayl Jones (Beacon Press, originally published in 1975): “A literary classic that remains vital to our understanding of the past, Corregidora is Gayl Jones's powerful debut novel, examining womanhood, sexuality, and the psychological residue of slavery.”
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays by June Jordan (Civitas Book Publisher, 2003): this book “brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings.”
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe (Duke University Press, 2016): this book is fascinating! I could try to describe it, but the publisher copy is probably better than what I could do: “Activating multiple registers of ‘wake’—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery.”
Indelicacy by Amina Cain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020): a gorgeous short novel about a woman who wants to write.
I wrote last week about Cormac’s “Diary of…” series, and this week I thought I’d share some covers (with permission). Look for these books some day in a bookstore near you!
Have a good week everyone!
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