Tokyo Ueno Station

Tokyo Ueno Station is a novel by the Korean Japanese writer Yu Miri, translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles. Its narrator, Kazu, is a ghost. Born in Fukushima in 1933, he came to Tokyo as a laborer to help build the city for the 1964 Olympics, sending money home to the family he rarely saw. Years later, after a series of losses, he ended his life living in the homeless encampment in Ueno Park, and now his spirit drifts through the park and the station nearby. As he watches visitors, commuters and other homeless men, Kazu looks back on a life shaped by hard work, inequality and grief, set against the backdrop of the 2011 tsunami and the announcement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The short novel was first published in Japan in 2014. It won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature.