Best of the Best Book Club: "Tokyo Ueno Station" by Yu Miri

Join Coronado Public Library's newest book club, the Best of the Best! We meet regularly on the 4th Tuesday of each month to discuss books that have won major awards. Receive reminder emails about our meeting by registering below. Registration is not required. 

In July we will discuss the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature Winner, Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri. This novel is a surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo’s busiest train stations.

About Tokyo Ueno Station: 

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.

Place the book on hold on the Coronado Public Library catalog by clicking here or check out the e-book or audiobook on the Libby app.