Tokyo Ueno Station

Tokyo Ueno Station is a 2020 novel by Yu Miri, translated into English by Morgan Giles. The novel follows the first-person narrative of Kazu, a recently deceased man who haunts Ueno Station and the park that borders it. While alive, Kazu was part of the unhoused population of Ueno Park. His narrative shows how the transition of Japan into a modern, industrial, commercially successful country after World War II came at the expense of people like Kazu, a man of humble origins. As Japan modernized, men like Kazu became itinerant and left behind their families for the promise of a better life. These dreams were never achieved. Instead, the sacrifices, which helped Japan grow into an international economic powerhouse, were never fully repaid. Kazu’s life is a story of lost hope in the face of perpetual poverty and grief, and his tone throughout the novel is one of sorrow and regret.

This guide refers to the 2020 Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The novel contains discussion and depiction of death by suicide, which this guide references.

Plot Summary

The novel begins as a first-person narrator named Kazu Mori describes a sound, which is never identified. The opening passages are disorienting, intentionally so, because Kazu is actually a deceased person. He is telling the story as a ghost, a spirit who lingers in Ueno Park. Kazu does not explicitly mention that he is dead until partway through the story, and it only becomes clear that he died by suicide near the end of the novel.

Kazu explicitly discusses his experiences as man without a home in Ueno Park. As Kazu’s specter haunts the park, he describes what he sees in the novel’s present; he also chronicles his own life. He informs the reader of his upbringing: that he grew up poor, and once he was old enough to work, he left home and pursued any job opportunity that he could find. He discusses his marriage to Setsuko and the family that he had with her, which included a son and a daughter. As the children grew up, Kazu was almost always away from home working to support his family.

Among the more significant moments in Kazu’s life is the death of his son Koichi, who died from unknown, mysterious circumstances at the age of 21. Kazu details the pain and grief that he and his wife suffered and also describes many cultural practices of his community in the honoring of the recently deceased. Koichi is not the only loved one who dies prematurely. Setsuko, a woman who had prioritized her family and who had lived a life of service to others, also dies suddenly. The partial disintegration of his family emotionally devastates Kazu in a way he cannot recover from because he regrets that he was not more of a presence in the lives of those he lost.

After his wife dies, Kazu’s granddaughter, Mari, provides care for him temporarily. While she is a kind and responsible woman, Kazu feels as though he is a burden to her. He eventually leaves her care and vanishes to Tokyo, where he spends his final days trying to survive as an unhoused person in Ueno Park.

Also significant in the novel is Japanese history, usually revealed through the monologues of Kazu’s friend Shige. Among the historical subjects are the Edo period and the Meiji Restoration; the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II by US forces; the economic aftermath of the war, which included urban growth and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; and the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Kazu was also born on the same day as the emperor, a fact that highlights how the circumstances that people are born into have a tremendous impact on what their lives become.

The novel follows a non-linear time pattern and frequently shifts from recollections of the past to descriptions of the present. As the novel nears its conclusion, it shifts back to Kazu, who is living at Ueno Park. He is evidently ill. On one particular day in 2006, an imperial visit is planned, and authorities impose restrictions on the unhoused population who use the park as a place for their encampments. With the encampments closed and removed, Kazu must seek shelter wherever he can find it. He wanders the area in search of these places, all the while suffering from illness. He returns to the park early, where he makes eye contact with the imperial family. Abruptly, he decides to descend into a subway station, where trains are departing for his hometown. As one last act of desperation, Kazu dies by suicide by throwing himself in front of an oncoming train.

Kazu then describes experiencing the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan, especially in the Fukushima region. He witnesses, from a remote distance, the death of his granddaughter, Mari, as the car she is driving is overtaken by the tsunami wave and swept out to sea. This is Kazu’s first observation after his death. In an act of circular storytelling, the novel ends the same way it begins: with Kazu describing but not identifying a sound.