Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)

A Novel

By: Yu Miri, Morgan Giles - translator

Narrated by: Johnny Heller

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 towards 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.

Haunting, tragic

some -beautiful- prose, wonderful translation/reading. Had this on my list for a long time, jumped into it without any context- I just really like Ueno. A very sad read but very beautiful,

painful but needed

when we want to look away or ignore the homeless we forget they're hardship and how cold the night; but also family can be

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.

Very sad story but beautiful

Loved the story very moving, learned about Tokyo and homelessness, families and love. Very well done

Very moving

I was deeply moved by this very human story of love, bad luck and loss. The reader’s voice has just the right tone all through the whole story. I highly recommend this beautiful book.