Tokyo Ueno Station

similar.



Each and every face looks like nothing so much as a small pool of water.



I'm watching for myself on the day I first set foot on the platform at Ueno Station, in the throng of people waiting for the Yamanote Line inner-loop train to arrive.



I used to look at my appearance reflected in mirrors, glass panes, and pictures, and I had no confidence in myself. I do not think I was especially ugly, but I never had the kind of looks that would have attracted anyone's attention.



My reticence and incompetence troubled me more than my appearance, but worst of all was how unlucky I was.



I had no luck.



I hear that sound again. Just that sound, like it's blood coursing-like a vivid current flowing-back then I heard nothing but that sound, rushing around inside my skull, like there was a hive in my head and hundreds of bees were trying to fly out all at once, it buzzed and burned and hurt, I could think of nothing anymore, my eyelids twitched and trembled as if they were being hit by raindrops, I clenched my fists, all the muscles in my body tensed-



It ripped me to shreds, but the sound wouldn't die.



I couldn't catch it, and trap it, or lead it far from me.



I couldn't close my ears to it, and I couldn't get away.



Ever since then that sound has lived with me.



Lived . . . ?



"The train now approaching Platform Two is for Ikebukuro and Shinjuku. For your safety please stand behind the yellow line."



 



If you go out the ticket gates at Ueno Station's park exit and look over the road to the grove of ginkgo trees, you'll always see homeless people there.



When I sat there, I felt like an only child who had been orphaned, despite the fact that both of my parents had lived into their nineties, never leaving their village in Sma, Fukushima Prefecture. And following my own birth in 1933, my parents had four daughters and three sons: Haruko, Fukiko, Hideo, Naoko, Michiko, Katsuo, and Masao.



The fourteen years between Masao and me made him more like my

but sprawling tale finds a deeply sympathetic hero in a man who feels displaced and longs for connection after it s too late. Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
 
Restrained and mature. A gemlike, melancholy novel infused with personal and national history. Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review
 
A surreal fable of splintered families, disintegrating relationships, and the casual devaluation of humanity. Booklist, STARRED review

"A radical and deeply felt work of fiction, psychogeography and history all at once, tapping us straight into the lifeblood of a Tokyo we rarely see: Tokyo from the margins, rooted in the city's most vulnerable and least visible lives - and deaths." Elaine Castillo. author of America Is Not the Heart

"One thing Yu can do is write. She is simultaneously a social outcast and a literary star, a dark, brooding presence on the bookshelves. A creative genius." New York Times

"Yu, an ethnic Korean in Japan, is no stranger to modern society s traps driven by nationalism,capitalism, classism, sexism. Her anglophoned latest (gratitude to translator Giles for providing fluent accessibility) is a surreal fable of splintered families, disintegrating relationships, and the casual devaluation of humanity."  Booklist (Starred Review)