Here's what you'll find if you take the Ueno Park exit

The book begins, "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."

So what then is Yu Miri's book Tokyo Ueno Station? It's glimpses of the life of a laborer, Kazu Mori, born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor. The book includes history—the firebombing of Tokyo, Saigo Takemori's role in the Meiji Restoration . . . Japanese funeral rituals—the death of the narrator's 21-year-old son . . . a picture of contemporary Japan most tourists don't see—the lives of the homeless . . . and an unusual narrator—"Things like [hydrangeas in bloom] always made me feel lonely when I was alive." 

And because the narrator is dead, it raises questions about an afterlife I'll touch on in a moment.

Yu Miri's background

Miri was born to Korean parents in Yokohama in1968. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, "Her father was a compulsive gambler who physically abused his wife and children; her mother was a bar hostess who frequently took the teenaged Yū along to parties, where Yū was occasionally molested. One of Yū’s sisters became an actress in pornographic films. Yū became so confused about languages—when to use Japanese or Korean—that she developed a stutter. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old; she repeatedly tried to commit suicide as a teenager and was eventually expelled from high school."

Nevertheless, she's been celebrated as a playwright and novelist, winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel Kazoku shinema (Family Cinema) in 1997. She's received threats from Japanese right-wingers who see her as defaming the country and being an ethnic Korean and non-citizen does not help. Gold Rush, a violent story of children in a dysfunctional family, was her first novel to be translated into English.

Kazu Mori tells his story, much of it in dialect in the original, making Morgan Giles's smooth translation even more impressive. Kazu left his wife and children in Fukushima to find work in Tokyo building structures for the 1964 Olympics. Because there was still no work in the northeast even during the boom years, he stayed in Tokyo, returning home long enough to sire a son and a daughter. Eventually he moves back. His son dies. His daughter marries and moves away. His wife dies. His granddaughter moves in with him to care for him. However he thinks, "She shouldn't be tied down here with her granddad,' and slips away to live as a homeless person in Tokyo's Ueno Park.

Much of the novel's action takes place in Ueno, which has the zoo and a number of museums. It is a favorite spot to picnic during cherry blossom viewing. The cops clear the park of the cardboard and vinyl tarp shelters when the royal family has an official occasion to visit. At the end of the book Kazu dies, which is hardly a spoiler because he's told us on page 33 he's dead.

Tokyo Ueno Station is short; you can read it in a single sitting. It's an interesting presentation of what I'm willing to believe is a possible—representative? emblematic?—Japanese life. As such it does not have a conventional plot. But the claim of a dead narrator made me consider.

Questions about an afterlife

Kazu talks as if he were alive and recalling events from his life. But at one point he notices a bird, "and I wondered if perhaps the bird was Koichi," his dead son. Certainly a thorough-going Buddhist could well his son has been reincarnated as a bird. But, if so, why hasn't the narrator been reincarnated? (Okay, maybe he's in the bardo if you want to bring in an idea that does not exist in the book.)

But there's more. The family are Pure Land (Jōdo) Buddhists, and the book emphasizes they are not Shingon, Tendai, or Sōtō Buddhists. In this teaching, "if one repeated the name of Amida Buddha, countless other Buddhas would surround you and bring you happiness. These would be the dead, who had returned to the Pure Land, and who would now protect us." But there is no indication Kazu has returned to the Pure Land and he does not protect anyone. 

So what is being dead like? Like being being alive but without a body? Like being reincarnated as a bird or some other creature? Or like going to the Pure Land which is "inhabited by many gods, men, flowers, fruits, and adorned with wish-granting trees where rare birds come to rest"? 

I am, I know, asking far too much of Tokyo Ueno Station. None of these questions reduce the power of the book. Giles is currently translating another Yu Mori novel, The End of August, "an experimental, semi-autobiographical epic spanning Korea and Japan over several decades and generation." I look forward to reading it.