Tokyo Ueno Station

About

A homeless man haunts Ueno Park in Tokyo — literally. He is a ghost, and from his spectral vantage point he watches the living: the other homeless men who share the park, the tourists, the construction workers preparing for the Olympics, and the imperial family whose residence borders the park's edge. His own story emerges in fragments — a life of labor, migration from Fukushima, and the systematic erasure of people society prefers not to see. Yu Miri's National Book Award winner is a ghost story that is really about invisibility — the kind enforced by poverty, by policy, and by the willful blindness of a city that would rather not look. The prose is spare and haunting, building its portrait of structural violence from the accumulated weight of small, overlooked details. A novel about the people a city steps over — told by a ghost who can finally say what the living never wanted to hear.