Yū Miri – Contemporary Japanese Literature

Yū Miri’s 2014 novel Tokyo Ueno Station is a compelling portrait of one man’s life and a pointed critique of the inequalities that support the supposed national prosperity championed by the Tokyo Olympics.

Kazu, an unhoused man living in Ueno Park, was born in the town of Sōma in Fukushima in 1933. In order to support his family, Kazu moved to Tokyo in 1963 as a laborer engaged in the construction of athletic facilities for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Kazu has lived in Tokyo since then, only visiting his family occasionally. When he finally retires and returns to Fukushima, his wife dies seven years later. Not wanting to become a burden to his daughter and granddaughter, Kazu takes the train back to Tokyo. He’s so exhausted when he disembarks at Ueno Station that he simply lies down in the large public park outside the station and goes to sleep. In this way, almost by accident, he becomes homeless. As Kazu reflects:

If you fall into a pit you can climb out, but once you slip from a sheer cliff, you cannot step firmly into a new life again. The only thing that can stop you is the moment of your death. But nonetheless, one has to keep living until they die.

Though Kazu’s story is easy enough to follow, it’s narrated in fragments broken by the conversations of people walking through the park, which juxtapose the comforts of middle-class leisure against the day-by-day existence of unhoused people. The men and women living rough in Ueno Park aren’t abject by any means, as they’re cared for by each other and a network of local communities. Still, their lives are precarious, and they can be ordered to leave at any time.

Tokyo Ueno Station isn’t misery porn. Rather, it’s about helping the reader notice what was always visible. In a rare aphorism toward the end of the novel, Kazu remarks, “To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past, while still being in full view of everyone.”

In another sense, however, the conversations Kazu overhears in Ueno Park are indicative of how most people living in Tokyo don’t view the unhoused as dangerous. If two middle-aged housewives chatting about their pets don’t care about whether an unhoused person is chilling out on the next bench over, are homeless people really so much of an eyesore? They’re not criminals, so why shouldn’t they have the same right to occupy public space as everyone else?

And why should the police have the right to force the unhoused away from their belongings and their communities every time a member of the imperial family visits the area?

The novel closes with Kazu being kicked out of Ueno Park and forced to seek shelter elsewhere until an imperial visit is concluded. During this intensely uncomfortable period, he suffers a minor stroke and decides to throw himself on the train tracks at Ueno Station, a decision that happens to coincide with the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. In his last moments, Kazu’s spirit returns to the Fukushima town of Sōma, which was directly impacted by the tsunami and resulting nuclear crisis (as documented brilliantly in Ryo Morimoto’s monograph Nuclear Ghost).

Yū’s irony isn’t subtle: the fantasy of “Japan” can only be celebrated if the people who literally build its monuments and provide its energy are hidden away. Tokyo Ueno Station asks the reader to consider the symbol of the Japanese Emperor, as well as the persistence of the ideologies that once supported Japanese military imperialism and continue to marginalize Japan’s own people.

As an American, I will readily admit that this is not my circus, but I can’t deny that Yū’s writing has given me some strong feelings about clowns. To me, it makes perfect sense that Tokyo Ueno Station was awarded the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020, right in the middle of the first Trump presidency.

Still, despite the strength of its argument and the sharpness of its critique, I don’t think that shaping political opinion is the point of this novel. Rather, the beauty of Tokyo Ueno Station lies in Kazu’s individual story, as well the fascinating collage of impressions he creates through his observations of the city, which are linked to his experiences growing up in the regional culture of coastal Fukushima. There is value in seeing what is often ignored, and value in documenting quiet voices that are often unheard.

What Yū demonstrates is the value and dignity of small and personal stories, especially in the face of large national narratives that crush the marginalized in the name of progress. Tokyo Ueno Station doesn’t make any sweeping political arguments or engage in polemics, but rather allows the remarkable individuality of Kazu’s story to shine. The brilliance of Yū’s critique is that, while Kazu’s story is his own, his unfortunate fate feels inevitable in the current of larger forces. Despite its literary style and gut-punch ending, Tokyo Ueno Station isn’t a difficult novel to read, but it’s a difficult story to sit with.

Title: Gold Rush
Japanese Title: ゴールドラッシュ (Gōrudo Rasshu)
Author: Yū Miri (柳美里)
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Publication Year: 2002 (America); 1998 (Japan)
Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers
Pages: 286

I recently stumbled across an article titled Reading List: Books to Help You Understand Japan, which is a transcript of a conversation between NPR’s Neal Conan, the Brooklyn-based poet Kimiko Hahn, and Donald Keene, who recently retired from Columbia University in order to live in Japan. When Hahn and Keene were asked to list their top five works for understanding Japan in the wake of the recent disasters that have beset the country, they fired off titles like The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon and Essays in Idleness. This bothers me for three reasons.

The first reason is the blatant cultural essentialism, or the idea that one can understand everything about contemporary Japan by reading texts written in the Heian period, as if nothing has changed in the past thousand years. It’s like saying that one can understand everything about contemporary America by reading Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The Japanese people live (and have always lived) in harmony with nature and posses (and have always possessed) an innate understanding of the beauty of impermanence – and Americans are all God-fearing Puritans who stifle their artistic creativity and capitalistic interests in order to serve their small agricultural communities.

The second reason is the academic elitism. The Tale of Genji is indeed a great monument of Japanese literature. It is also more than a thousand pages long, written in a style that is frustratingly elliptical, and set in a time period and society that are fairly alien to anything a contemporary American (or Japanese) reader would be familiar with. Reading The Tale of Genji is hard, and reading it without guidance is even harder. To assume that even a highly educated and intelligent reader could just pick it up and understand the unadulterated beauty of every word is somewhat presumptuous. Hahn’s recommendation of two literary anthologies is even more baffling. It’s like saying, hey, if you can’t crack open a 421-page anthology of medieval literature and read it in one sitting, there must be something wrong with you.

The final reason is the utterly bizarre assumption that, in order to understand the contemporary Japanese imagination of disaster, one need not read anything either written or set later than 1945. This is doubly strange to me, as Donald Keene recently published an excellent translation of Oda Makoto’s 1998 novel The Breaking Jewel (Gyokusai), which depicts a Japanese soldier’s harrowing experiences during the last few weeks of the Pacific War. Moreover, even if tales of firebombings and severe food shortages and suicide attacks and two atomic bombs and total defeat and occupation by a foreign power wouldn’t give us any insight into postwar and post-earthquake Japanese society, perhaps something like Murakami Haruki’s After the Quake, written in the wake of the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995, presumably would. To suggest that we can best understand Japanese anxieties regarding nuclear power by reading the poetic travel diaries of Bashō is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

I think Yū Miri’s novel Gold Rush is a perfect antidote to the sort of essentialist thinking demonstrated in the conversation on NPR. Gold Rush is set in Yokohama’s Kogane-chō neighborhood, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks sort of neighborhood filled with small bars, cheap restaurants, pachinko parlors, and love hotels. When most people think of Yokohama, they probably picture the swanky and high-tech Minato Mirai waterfront area or the upscale Motomachi shopping and residential district that serves as the setting of several Tanizaki and Mishima novels. Kogane-chō, however, is a grungy, run-down pleasure quarter that has seen better days, as is the neighboring Isezaki-chō. The streets are dirty, the Ōoka River is dirty, the karaoke bars are dirty, the train station is dirty, the cheap hotels under the railway bridge are dirty, and I imagine that even the many soaplands that dot the area are dirty. Gold Rush begins when four middle school boys pick up a high school girl in this neighborhood. They get her drunk, have her come with them to one of their houses, and then rape her. To be more precise, three of them rape her, and one of them watches.

The one who watches is the book’s fourteen-year-old protagonist, Kazuki, and abetting a rape is just the beginning for him. If trigger warnings were applied to mainstream fiction, Gold Rush would be slapped with all of the big ones. Rape, violence, child abuse, murder, more rape, more child abuse, substance abuse, abandonment, sexism, self-harming behavior, eating disorders, more child abuse, and then more rape. There is also a particularly nasty scene in which Kazuki kills a dog with a golf club. One might question the existence of a plot buried under all of these triggers, but the plot isn’t really the point of the novel. The reader is instead engrossed in following Kazuki’s slow psychological deterioration from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator. Kazuki is like Holden Caulfield on crack, and the reader can’t help but identify with his adolescent frustration at the realization that his life and his destiny are not entirely his own, even if he continually takes his rage one step too far. The people who surround Kazuki aren’t much better than he is in terms of acting like decent human beings, and the world they all live in is a bitter, nasty place. In a way, though, Gold Rush is also a twisted sort of love letter to Kogane-chō and the low city charm that permeates it.

Reading Gold Rush is like reading a full-length Ionesco play like Rhinocéros (or a Bret Easton Ellis novel like American Psycho) in that it’s trenchant and biting and brilliantly absurd, but difficult to actually read for the very same reasons. It doesn’t help that Gold Rush is two hundred and fifty pages of ultraviolence unmitigated by chapter breaks. If there’s a reason the novel won the Akutagawa Prize, however, it’s because the writing is excellent. Perhaps it’s also because the physical and psychological spaces written by Yū Miri are more than a little familiar to Japanese readers. So yes, classics like The Tale of Genji are very Japanese, but so is Gold Rush, which is written by a zainichi Korean telling a story about juvenile delinquency in a decaying neighborhood of a seedy commuter city. Yū is a good writer, she tells a good story, and Gold Rush is good Japanese literature. It might even give the reader some small insight into contemporary Japan as well.