Tokyo Ueno Station Book Review

by Catalina Bonati

2.75/5 stars

Tokyo Ueno Station (2014) by Yū Miri is a short novel about the life of a Japanese man from the countryside named Kazu who has made his life alone in Tokyo while leaving his family behind. The story is non-linear and jumps between past and present.

The story is strong in its distinction between present Ueno and past Fukushima. However, this doesn’t work so well in the overall structure of the story. Events of the past are easy to understand; they are told simply and logically. However, the present is hard to follow as it feels discombobulated and unrelated to the narrator’s thoughts. Present settings and actions of characters are unexplained, so the surrounding dialogue seems unconnected and irrelevant. The narration seems to lose the plot at times, as sometimes the description which follows an event is unrelated to said event which makes the narration seem unengaged to the story. It must be said that such a muddled story structure does serve to highlight how Kazu is not integrated to his present and lives his interior life mainly through his memories. Kazu’s past was not a happy one—the sadness over the early death of his son and the unexpected death of his wife seeps into his every memory.

The story is mostly told in tangents—overheard conversations, descriptions of a rose gallery, reflecting on the temperature of sake, recollections of fishing. These tangents carry no relevance to the plot or to the characters, yet they are the weight of the book. Actions follow these tangents, but there is no build-up or explanations so these actions which are always in the present are read as tangents to the tangents rather than the main story. The narrator says near the end of the book, “in life there is no distinguishing past, present, and future. We all have an enormity of time, too big for one person to deal with […]”. This statement refers to a story which blends seamlessly its tenses and settings, yet the story did no such thing. In fact, there is such a strong distinction between past and present that the writing quality shifts unevenly towards the past and the present is unstructured. No future is ever referred or alluded to.

The story speaks on the homeless people who live in Ueno park and what it’s like when they clear the park for an imperial procession or for the Tokyo Olympics. It’s an interesting topic but it’s told in such an offhand way that it seems like another tangent rather than part of the main storyline. Overall, this book covered interesting topics that were deserving of a more structured and well-executed story. For me, Tokyo Ueno Station fell flat.