Tokyo Ueno Station

A Novel

By: Yu Miri, Morgan Giles

Narrated by: Johnny Heller

Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations.

Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo.

Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics.

Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled toward this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

©2020 Yu Miri (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Tokyo Ueno Station is a dream: a chronicle of hope, loss, where we've been and where we're going. That Yu Miri could conjure so many realities simultaneously is nothing short of marvelous. The novel astounds, terrifies, and make the unseen concrete - entirely tangible and perennially effervescent, right there on the page." (Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial)

"Poetic.... 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.... It is an urgent reminder of the radical divide between rich and poor in postwar Japan." (The Guardian)

"A radical and deeply felt work of fiction, psychogeography and history all at once, tapping us straight into the lifeblood of a Tokyo we rarely see: Tokyo from the margins, rooted in the city's most vulnerable and least visible lives - and deaths." (Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart) 

Goods story, great translation, poor narration

The story is moving though a bit predictable. The translation is smooth and natural.
The narrator has trouble pronouncing Japanese words and names, making me cringe at times.

Raw

Strips off my stereotypes of Japan and reveals a believable, perhaps common story of hardship and survival.

Heartbreaking story; avoid this narration

First my thoughts on the book, then on the narration:

This novel caught my attention for its setting in Japan during the period from roughly the 1960s through 2010s, narrated from an alternative perspective— one that is usually invisible and ignored: a man who becomes homeless in his later years. It’s a portrait of the social and economic changes in both Tokyo and the countryside that builds in a sense of cultural texture of the era - pachinko parlors, street life, urban development, and individuals struggling along in the tides of local and national priorities and disasters. But it’s also a heartbreaking portrait of this man looking back on an entire lifetime, wondering what went wrong and looking at the world around him passing him by. At times the first person non-linear structure can seem meandering and repetitive, but that could be justified as an effort to replicate the voice of an older man who has been leading a marginal, peripatetic existence, and an experiment with conveying the ways that memory can be layered, inconsistent, doubted, revised. In this book, time itself can seem to expand, contract, and fold in on itself as it does in lived experience.

That said, even though this is a short book, the unremitting suffering, loss, and tragedies in the narrative make it a very hard read. It often feels like the book of Job, minus the famous frame of that parable. In seeking to convey the harsh contrasts, desperation, and painful ironies of life for the homeless, the author does not shy away from being relentless. But it strains credibility when the symbolism or contextual details come across as heavy handed or forced. One key example is the way the author, in an effort to convey the huge gap between this Everyman and the imperial family, sets up some highly unlikely coincidences that get repeated several times — the narrator and his son are born on same day as two successive emperors yet have starkly different fates. Similarly, the 1960s Tokyo Olympics are mentioned a few times, bearing heavy weight as symbols of the contemporary globalization, the aspirations of contemporary Japan, and the socioeconomic realities for laborers hired for all the construction involved.

If you do read this book, go for the print version, not this audio. I wished I had listened to a sample first. As others have noted, the clipped plaintive tone of the main narration is weirdly mechanical and distracting... I kept wondering if the narrator was trying to make the book sound more “Japanese,” more “gruff”? Yet it ultimately sounds like a “broken-English” accent, which just comes across as inappropriate. (Later in the book there are a few other brief voices of Japanese women that the narrator performed realistically, and quite well, without the weird mechanical accent, which makes the clipped tone of the rest of the narration all the more inexplicable and annoying.)

It was especially distracting to hear so many basic Japanese place names, people’s names, and phrases mispronounced or with emphasis on all the wrong syllables in this audio version. Even Buddha— a word most English speakers can pronounce fairly well—is rendered in this audio version as Boooo.Da., which sounds so fake and comical that it ruins several scenes, such as a funeral where the incantations are supposed to convey a deeply somber tone.

Audiobook producers : Please hire readers who can pronounce words correctly when a book contains a lot of phrases and names in languages other than English. Don’t assume your listeners only speak English and will never know the difference!

Audiobook narrators: If you do hope to take on a project that involves a languages other than those you speak, please consult a voice coach who has native-level fluency, and practice in advance those words and phrases with them till you get it right. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but at least get the right sounds and emphasis. And please carefully consider the tone and accenting of your narration, so that it doesn’t inappropriately come across as broken English.

excruciating

I am a nut for Japan and I normally eat up literature about Tokyo and it's quirks. however, this story and this narration left me bored, confused, and annoyed that I wasted money downloading a book.

Poor narrator, meandering story but moments of greatness

As others have noted the narrator was, bluntly, awful. His whining plaintive delivery ruined some nicely written poignant prose. The story wandered, though, repeated certain plot points as if the author had forgotten the previous mentions, and I found the protagonist vacuous & not particularly likable. Honestly if this book had been longer I probably would’ve stopped listening.

short story about life and hardships

Throws a different perspective on Japan too. It strips the mysterious and glamorous coat and shows real people with real-life problems.

Awful narrator

It was hard to concentrate on the book as the narrator butchered Japanese names and words. What a shame since the book is quite good. Better to read in print. What a waste of my money and time…

Good story but the reader ruined it for me.

If you’ve never visited or lived in Japan you wouldn’t notice. But the reader consistently mispronounced every single thing he could get his mouth around.

All of the city and region names were spoken in American English with a complete lack of effort applied to getting them even close to right. It was grating.

Other than that this story is wonderful and the translation was done well. You get a true sense of what life is like for the (absolutely not voluntarily) homeless in Tokyo. I’d recommend people read it and skip the verbal assault on location names.

Moving novel by important writer

For Japanese speakers the mispronounced place names may be jarring, but good reading overall. Great short novel.

Boring and cringe narration

I blame myself for expecting something else from this book. I expected this book to be a ghost-story but from the perspective of the ghost at a Japanese train station etc.. I was very wrong, but still gave it a chance because it’s not the book’s fault that I was full of assumptions.

Either way, the book was just super boring and couldn’t engage. I think it may have been due to the narrator whom is a white guy that sounds like a Latino trying to speak Japanese. Apparently he is very sought after for his voice; but due to the cultural aspect of this book it was just cringe. I almost guarantee my experience would have been a bit better if we had a different narrator.