Tokyo Ueno Station: A Novel (2014 original; edició 2021)

I generally avoid reading Japanese literature, and this book reminded me why.

Kazu intentionally chooses a life of homelessness in his twilight years, and then chooses to end his life violently at the Tokyo Ueno Train Station. He spends his afterlife wandering around Tokyo as a ghost, recounting all of the boring conversations he overhears and whining about what a miserable life he had.

Like every other Japanese novel I have ever read this story was: vague, meandering, nonsensical, and monotonous…bloated with emptiness, self-loathing, and hopelessness.

It’s no wonder Japan is known for having such high suicide rates. ( )

3.5

Eu li esse livro num impulso sem nem saber direito sobre o que se tratava, tanto que pela capa colorida eu não esperava que ele fosse mais um pra lista de livros de literatura japonesa melancólicos que tenho na minha estante.

Nesse livro acompanhamos o protagonista Kazu, que agora está morto. Ao longo da história, contada em primeira pessoa, ele conta sobre suas origens, sua vinda à cidade grande e todas as dificuldades e tragédias que ele encontrou em sua vida pessoal e, ao fim, como ele encontrou a morte.

Apesar de não achar nada wow, gostei bastante de acompanhar o protagonista e da sua narração. Não é um livro que te deixa extremamente triste, mas te faz refletir sobre o que o personagem passou, e o que tantas pessoas na vida real passaram e ainda passam igual a ele.

Esse livro ganhou o 2020 National Book Award de obra traduzida, e de fato a tradução (do japonês para o inglês) é bem fluída e não prejudica a leitura. ( )

This was very well received and won tne National Book Award in Translation. It is about a ghost revisiting places he stayed as he became homeless (voluntarily to spare his family) and then was a casualty of the tsunami at Fukushima. The character/narrator is layered and brought out through both his actions and his commentary. The drawback for me was the very frequent mention of places and events that I am sure would enrich the book for a reader who had lived in Japan. But the book has sufficient universality to be engaging. ( )

A short novel describing 20th-century life for a farm family in Japan, from the perspective of one elderly widower, who ended his years homeless in Ueno Park in Tokyo. So many aspects of his life were affected by big events in Japanese history, but he was always in the background and he, as his mother said, always had bad luck. He saw the emperor more than once, their sons were born on the same day, the Tokyo Olympics and other huge construction projects fed his fanily, and then the Fukushima earthquake took the last descendant he knew personally.

This book is sad and it is lonely. When Kazu begins reminiscing, I would forget that it was a memory and feel his excitement and eagerness--only to remember, as the book goes on, that noooo that did happen but now he is a lonely old man living in a cardboard hut.
————
Growing up in Fukushima, Kazu was too young to fight in World War 2. After middle school he started working, and at 18 began traveling to Hokkaido and elsewhere to work. He married Setsuko and they lived with his parents, but farming was not enough to support all of the mouths. In 1964 he began working in Tokyo construction, getting ready for the Tokyo Olympics. He regularly went home, and his wife Setsuko took care of his parents and raised their two children in Fukushima. Many families lived this way, as farming was not the moneymaker small farmers needed it to be. Kazu lived in dorms, and flophouses, and so forth--always hoping to enjoy the fruits of his labor in his old age. ( )

The colorful cover art for Tokyo Ueno Station caught my eye at the public library, so I picked it up for the month-long Asian Readathon knowing nothing about the book. This is a very quick but impactful read - and also depressing.

I'll probably read through it again once more before returning it to the library, when I'll look for more novels by Yu Miri. ( )