A ghost's life and another side of Japan
On Japanese novel 'Tokyo Ueno Station', and a little bit on Japanese drama 'Midnight Diner'
Note: The only potential spoilers here are ones you can find in the book’s synopsis. If you want to go into this book completely blind, this is your chance to turn back. There are no spoilers for Midnight Diner besides the premise.
‘I never carried any photos with me, but I was always surrounded by people, places, and times gone by. And as I retreated into the future, the only thing I could ever see was the past.
It was nothing as sweet as nostalgia or a longing for bygone days, just a constant absence from the present, an anger toward the future. I was always lost at a point in the past which would never go anywhere now it had gone, but has time ended? Has it just stopped? Will it someday rewind and start again? Or will I be shut out from time for eternity? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’
When I visited Japan more than a decade ago, it left such a stirring impression on me that I was convinced I would live there after undergraduate university.
Japan was nothing like the Philippines, my only home at the time. It was advanced, clean, and everything appeared to work smoothly. People seemed respectful during commutes, trains arrived on time, and even roadside eateries felt fancy.
I can still remember the feeling of breathing in a lung full of the air there; the loud whipping sound that made me jump whenever a train rolled past the one I was on; the sharp early winter cold I hadn’t experienced before that point; the mystifying fascination over convenience stores or konbini I never expected (to be fair, to this day, I still think Japan has the poshest convenience stores). By all accounts in the week I was there, I saw Japan as beautiful.
The Japan I witnessed and experienced then was true. But they were my truths, framed by my privileges as a visitor on a short university exchange programme and as a teenager with limited understanding of the world. These were truths informed and reinforced by whatever filtered picture of Japan I saw on TV and computer screens through anime, films, documentaries and news growing up.
To be sure, there were other truths too, even though I never knew them then.
Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station made me think a lot about those other truths I never paid attention to. The novel, originally published in Japan in 2014 with an English translation by Morgan Giles out with (the brilliant) Tilted Axis Press in 2019, draws attention to those in the margins of the modern, fancy Japan known internationally. It is, in many ways, a story about the forgotten.
Kazu is a labourer from Fukushima who ended up homeless later in life. He was born in the same year as the emperor in 1933. Their sons are also born on the same day in 1960. Throughout the novel, there are parallels in their lives that serve to underscore the stark and grotesque differences between them.
Kazu tells us about his life of labour to support his family, doing all kinds of jobs that eventually lead him farther away from them. He journeys to Japan’s capital to work in the construction of sports facilities for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He steps off the train at Ueno Station at the beginning of the novel.
What follows is a story that traces some of the major events in Japan (including the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster) from the perspective of those in the working and lower classes.
Despite the decades of work he put in, Kazu ends up homeless at 67 years old. He goes to Tokyo Ueno Park to live among a community of homeless people.
‘Nobody becomes homeless because they want to be. One thing happens, then another.
/
But nonetheless, one has to keep living until they die.’
Kazu starts off as an unnamed narrator and isn’t name-checked until about halfway through the book. This struck me because it only seemed to underscore the point Yu Miri was trying to make about the anonymity of the most vulnerable – rarely known or seen. It’s also clearly in sharp contrast to the emperor, whose name will inevitably live on in history books.
I came into this novel having completely forgotten the synopsis I read, so I did not realise right away that Kazu was already a ghost narrating his own story. I only began to wonder at points in his narration when he seemed to be alluding to his incorporeality.
Time is not exactly linear in this story – and fittingly so. We are led in and out of various points of Kazu’s life, sifting through his memories, as if his ghostly self was grasping to hold onto them. The life-altering moments are weaved into small ones that somehow left a mark.
'You never did have any luck did you?’ someone had told him. It stuck with him.
This is where I relate to Kazu most. He has a penchant for taking note of the small, mundane and seemingly inconsequential moments or statements. Clearly, he derives significant life force from them. They anchor him, for better or worse. I am the same. I enjoyed getting to know Kazu way beyond the plot points of his life in this way.
The first-person narration throughout the book gives us a glimpse into Kazu’s interiority, which is crucial in the context of Yu Miri’s themes of giving voice to those ignored and forgotten.
“To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen,” he mused.
Kazu’s thoughts are captivating.
“The memories of the past that I could not get rid of were all contained in a box. And time had sealed the lid.”
Tokyo Ueno Station reminds me so much of the Japanese drama Midnight Diner. The drama, available to watch on Netflix, is set in a small izakaya open only from midnight to 7am in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It’s owned by a mysterious chef (“Master”) who has just one thing on the menu but will cook anything diners would like as long as ingredients are available.
“Do I even have customers?” Master asks in the drama’s iconic opening (which is unskippable in my view). “More than you would expect.”
True enough, the izakaya attracts loyal patrons and all sorts of characters with interesting stories. Each episode is focused on the story of one or a couple of the customers. We are shown different perspectives, motivations and a wide range of life experiences from people across Japan who made it to the izakaya in the middle of a large, bustling city.
I see parallels between Midnight Diner and Tokyo Ueno Station in the ways they both refuse to flatten ordinary people’s lives, choosing instead to be nuanced and not the least bit judgmental.
‘To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past, while still being in full view of everyone.’
I talk about Kazu with a sense of realism because Yu Miri herself contextualises the legitimate realities the novel sprang from in her afterword.
In writing this book, she adopted a journalistic approach and did a tremendous amount of research over many years on the issue of homelessness in Japan, speaking to people who have become homeless and following their lives at Ueno Park. She immersed herself in their world and listened to their stories, especially as the evictions came.
She wrote of the various injustices homeless people faced in a scathing criticism of Tokyo’s local government. For example, she told the story of a man who was refused entry into a shelter during a typhoon in 2019, saying the shelter was only for residents of the area. The man had become homeless after suffering from a stroke a few years earlier and was unable to return to work as a day labourer. He wound up sheltering under an umbrella throughout a night of pouring rain and violent winds.
Yu Miri cited other examples of disaster response in Japan that excluded not just homeless people but also people with disabilities. She likewise highlighted disturbing rhetoric and social stigma around homeless people in Japan.
On Filipino social media, Japan’s highly organised disaster response is always praised and held as the standard, especially compared to the Philippines’ own often woeful version of it. After reading Kazu’s story, Yu Miri’s afterword and various articles on the issue from my own research prompted by this novel, it’s illuminating to learn once more in very real terms that things aren’t as perfect as they seem.
“There are those who say that even in the face of disaster, Japanese people do not resort to violence, they queue patiently, cooperate, let others go first, and show their good manners,” Yu Miri wrote. “They wrap the whole thing in a beautiful cloth so that it won’t be made public.”
As usual, good and bad can be true at the same time.
"If I don't exist, I can't disappear either.”
I understand Tokyo Ueno Station, written in soothing and very poetic prose, to be a meditation on relevance and our time here. Whether an emperor or a labourer, what each of us might want is for there to be a point to it all, to be relevant in some way (not necessarily in the grand scheme of human history, but at the very least to the people and world around us).
And yet, Kazu strikes me as someone who could have been a great historical figure of his time if he had been born into different circumstances. I can see the way he seems to yearn for something to anchor him to life, and to be seen, after a life of being unseen, including by his own family.
He observes and takes note of people chatting about trivial matters by a statue, happily ignoring something intended to be a permanent reminder of a significant person or event. It could very well be that those people know about the statue and what it represents all too well to pay attention to it at every chance. But in the context of Kazu’s thoughts and this story, it tells me that he laments how even a statue, a commemoration, a remembrance, something meant to be known, will be ignored.
Kazu went from working to build the infrastructure for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, to being evicted from the spot where his hut stood to clear away Ueno Park and make an impression for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics bid. His life was closely tied to key points in Japan’s history, and it went unwritten. It will be the same for most of us.
Still, whatever else Kazu (and anyone he might represent) was, was not, or could not become in the timeline of his life, the point was, in this novel, he existed.
It’s a chilling but telling irony that Kazu tells his story as a ghost – he practically lived like one. In the end, though, he transcends. Yu Miri succeeds in her goal. We stop and listen to him. We no longer walk past him on the street.
The next time I’m in Japan, I just might see.
‘The calendar separates today from yesterday and tomorrow, but 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, and we live, and we die–’
Meanwhile, the climate crisis…
If you haven’t read my welcome post, I mentioned that for every essay, I will include a piece about the climate crisis so we’re in the loop even when we’re lost in our own rabbit holes.
This time I offer something somewhat hopeful. But first, the bad: the ways we currently produce and eat food are untenable for the planet. Did you know that, tragically, as a global population, our calories primarily come from just three crops? That means they’re vulnerable to all kinds of things, especially climate change. We think we eat diversely, and in some ways that’s right (like for cuisine), but fundamentally that’s not entirely true and that’s a bad thing. Here’s the good: there are 5 other more resilient crops that could potentially feed a world of 8 billion people. We’re not there yet, and maybe we’re past the point of no return, but we’ll take whatever hope there is.
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See you down another rabbit hole!