brenticus reviewed Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
None
3 stars
Sometimes I read a book that I basically liked, but I have troubles putting it into words. Tokyo Ueno Station follows Kazu as he... exists, sort of. Because Kazu is dead, the ghost of an elderly homeless man haunting Ueno Station.
The story reflects on Kazu's life. There's both a lot there and also very little: many of his major life events overlap with those of Japan's royal family, with even his birth falling in the same year as Emperor Akihito, yet his life was spent... working. He worked from his childhood to help support his parents and siblings, then spent much of his life doing work away from his wife and children in order to earn enough for them to live comfortably. He even worked construction for the Olympic games in '64.
And what did he have for it, in the end? Kazu is homeless, living in a large homeless camp with all sorts of characters who either live there or pass by on their way to other things. While Kazu's story is powerful and moving, I found most of these other characters who happen to be around the park to be relatively weak. Most of the time I had no idea what they were doing in the narrative, thematically or otherwise, and their inclusion just muddied my attempts to follow the somewhat meandering plot.
I think a lot of the themes around class differences and homelessness and work and family are especially well-developed, but this book covers a lot of ideas. I'm hesitant to say whether this is a net negative or not. While it's interesting how stuff like Japan's economy after World War 2 is naturally present in Kazu's development, I'm not sure if everything is given enough attention to be worth inclusion. Even the 2020 Olympics, talked about in much of the marketing material I read, barely warrants a mention. This is fundamentally a story about Kazu's life and there are some threads you can see weaving throughout his life and others that truncate themselves quickly.
All in all I really liked this book, it just felt like a bit of a scattershot at times. There is a very powerful core character embodying very powerful themes, but there's also a lot of other stuff that tend towards distracting from the point. Still, it's not uncommon for me to miss the point on stuff like that, so even if I'm only giving it 3 stars I don't feel bad about whole-heartedly recommending this book.
The story reflects on Kazu's life. There's both a lot there and also very little: many of his major life events overlap with those of Japan's royal family, with even his birth falling in the same year as Emperor Akihito, yet his life was spent... working. He worked from his childhood to help support his parents and siblings, then spent much of his life doing work away from his wife and children in order to earn enough for them to live comfortably. He even worked construction for the Olympic games in '64.
And what did he have for it, in the end? Kazu is homeless, living in a large homeless camp with all sorts of characters who either live there or pass by on their way to other things. While Kazu's story is powerful and moving, I found most of these other characters who happen to be around the park to be relatively weak. Most of the time I had no idea what they were doing in the narrative, thematically or otherwise, and their inclusion just muddied my attempts to follow the somewhat meandering plot.
I think a lot of the themes around class differences and homelessness and work and family are especially well-developed, but this book covers a lot of ideas. I'm hesitant to say whether this is a net negative or not. While it's interesting how stuff like Japan's economy after World War 2 is naturally present in Kazu's development, I'm not sure if everything is given enough attention to be worth inclusion. Even the 2020 Olympics, talked about in much of the marketing material I read, barely warrants a mention. This is fundamentally a story about Kazu's life and there are some threads you can see weaving throughout his life and others that truncate themselves quickly.
All in all I really liked this book, it just felt like a bit of a scattershot at times. There is a very powerful core character embodying very powerful themes, but there's also a lot of other stuff that tend towards distracting from the point. Still, it's not uncommon for me to miss the point on stuff like that, so even if I'm only giving it 3 stars I don't feel bad about whole-heartedly recommending this book.