
Tokyo Ueno Station
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Johnny Heller
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By:
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Yu Miri
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Morgan Giles
About this listen
Winner of the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations.
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 toward 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, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.
©2020 Yu Miri (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Tokyo Ueno Station is a dream: a chronicle of hope, loss, where we've been and where we're going. That Yu Miri could conjure so many realities simultaneously is nothing short of marvelous. The novel astounds, terrifies, and make the unseen concrete - entirely tangible and perennially effervescent, right there on the page." (Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial)
"Poetic.... How Kazu comes to be homeless, and then to haunt the park, is what keeps us reading, trying to understand the tragedy of this ghostly everyman. Deftly translated by Morgan Giles.... It is an urgent reminder of the radical divide between rich and poor in postwar Japan." (The Guardian)
"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)
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Story
In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Through architecture, ceramics, theatre, food, women, and even toilets, Tanizaki explains the essence of shadows and darkness, and how they are able to augment beauty. He laments the heavy electric lighting of the West and its introduction to Japan, and shows how the artificial, bright, and polished aesthetic of the West contrasts unfavorably with the moody and natural light of the East.
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How to listen
- By Anonymous User on 03-25-18
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The Woman in the Purple Skirt
- A Novel
- By: Natsuko Imamura, Lucy North - translator
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 3 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched—by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.
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Wild
- By Anna Christine on 07-27-22
By: Natsuko Imamura, and others
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Ghost Wall
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Moss
- Narrated by: Christine Hewitt
- Length: 3 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In the North of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of its own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?
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A good read!
- By Chester Johnson on 02-23-19
By: Sarah Moss
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Convenience Store Woman
- By: Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori - translator
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Tokyo resident Keiko Furukara has never fit in - neither in her family, nor in school - but when at the age of 18 she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of national convenience store chain Smile Mart, she realizes instantly that she has found her purpose in life. Delighted to be able to exist in a place where the rules of social interaction are crystal clear (many are laid out line-by-line in the store's manual), Keiko does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and mode of speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less.
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Am amazing and different story
- By D.R. on 04-10-19
By: Sayaka Murata, and others
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Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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The Lantern of Lost Memories
- By: Sanaka Hiiragi
- Narrated by: Hanako Footman
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of the peculiar and magical photo studio owned by Mr. Hirasaka, a collector of antique cameras. In the dimly lit interior, a paper background is pulled down in front of a wall, and in front of it stands a single, luxurious chair with an armrest on one side. On a stand is a large bellows camera. On the left is the main studio; photos can also be taken in the courtyard. Beyond its straightforward interior, however, is a secret. The studio is, in fact, the door to the afterlife, the place between life and death where those who have departed have a chance—one last time.
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Quiet, magical feels...a bit like Harry
- By SHES4AMWF on 03-18-25
By: Sanaka Hiiragi
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Kokoro
- By: Natsume Soseki
- Narrated by: Matt Shea
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The subject of Kokoro, which can be translated as 'the heart of things' or as 'feeling,' is the delicate matter of the contrast between the meanings the various parties of a relationship attach to it. In the course of this exploration, Soseki brilliantly describes different levels of friendship, family relationships, and the devices by which men attempt to escape from their fundamental loneliness. The novel sustains throughout its length something approaching poetry, and it is rich in understanding and insight.
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The Heart Of Things, Relationships & Feelings
- By Sara on 04-27-15
By: Natsume Soseki
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The Full Moon Coffee Shop
- A Novel
- By: Mai Mochizuki, Jesse Kirkwood - translator
- Narrated by: Sadao Ueda, Tomoko Komura, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In Japan, cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they'll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a glittering Kyoto moon. This particular coffee shop is like no other. It has no fixed location, no fixed hours, and seemingly appears at random to adrift young people at crucial junctions in their lives. It's also run by talking cats.
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Narration ruined it for me
- By Dar Sar on 09-23-24
By: Mai Mochizuki, and others
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Vanishing World
- A Novel
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable.
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Excellent
- By Chris Reich on 04-28-25
By: Sayaka Murata
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The Employees
- A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century
- By: Olga Ravn
- Narrated by: Hannah Curtis
- Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
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I think this was a story?
- By Jordan on 07-02-23
By: Olga Ravn
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All the Lovers in the Night
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Mirai
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copyeditor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.
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Enjoyable listen
- By Rose on 05-16-22
By: Mieko Kawakami
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Orbital
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Sarah Naudi
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
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Dull
- By ELLEZEE on 02-03-24
By: Samantha Harvey
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The Buried Giant
- A Novel
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: David Horovitch
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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"You've long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it's time now to think on it anew. There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay..." The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years. Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.
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The beauty of the reveal
- By Anonymous User on 03-17-15
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Haunting, tragic
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The Only Constant is Displacement
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Very moving
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Poor narrator, meandering story but moments of greatness
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Very sad story but beautiful
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Raw
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Awful narrator
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Well-Examined Life Well Worth Reading
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This novel caught my attention for its setting in Japan during the period from roughly the 1960s through 2010s, narrated from an alternative perspective— one that is usually invisible and ignored: a man who becomes homeless in his later years. It’s a portrait of the social and economic changes in both Tokyo and the countryside that builds in a sense of cultural texture of the era - pachinko parlors, street life, urban development, and individuals struggling along in the tides of local and national priorities and disasters. But it’s also a heartbreaking portrait of this man looking back on an entire lifetime, wondering what went wrong and looking at the world around him passing him by. At times the first person non-linear structure can seem meandering and repetitive, but that could be justified as an effort to replicate the voice of an older man who has been leading a marginal, peripatetic existence, and an experiment with conveying the ways that memory can be layered, inconsistent, doubted, revised. In this book, time itself can seem to expand, contract, and fold in on itself as it does in lived experience.
That said, even though this is a short book, the unremitting suffering, loss, and tragedies in the narrative make it a very hard read. It often feels like the book of Job, minus the famous frame of that parable. In seeking to convey the harsh contrasts, desperation, and painful ironies of life for the homeless, the author does not shy away from being relentless. But it strains credibility when the symbolism or contextual details come across as heavy handed or forced. One key example is the way the author, in an effort to convey the huge gap between this Everyman and the imperial family, sets up some highly unlikely coincidences that get repeated several times — the narrator and his son are born on same day as two successive emperors yet have starkly different fates. Similarly, the 1960s Tokyo Olympics are mentioned a few times, bearing heavy weight as symbols of the contemporary globalization, the aspirations of contemporary Japan, and the socioeconomic realities for laborers hired for all the construction involved.
If you do read this book, go for the print version, not this audio. I wished I had listened to a sample first. As others have noted, the clipped plaintive tone of the main narration is weirdly mechanical and distracting... I kept wondering if the narrator was trying to make the book sound more “Japanese,” more “gruff”? Yet it ultimately sounds like a “broken-English” accent, which just comes across as inappropriate. (Later in the book there are a few other brief voices of Japanese women that the narrator performed realistically, and quite well, without the weird mechanical accent, which makes the clipped tone of the rest of the narration all the more inexplicable and annoying.)
It was especially distracting to hear so many basic Japanese place names, people’s names, and phrases mispronounced or with emphasis on all the wrong syllables in this audio version. Even Buddha— a word most English speakers can pronounce fairly well—is rendered in this audio version as Boooo.Da., which sounds so fake and comical that it ruins several scenes, such as a funeral where the incantations are supposed to convey a deeply somber tone.
Audiobook producers : Please hire readers who can pronounce words correctly when a book contains a lot of phrases and names in languages other than English. Don’t assume your listeners only speak English and will never know the difference!
Audiobook narrators: If you do hope to take on a project that involves a languages other than those you speak, please consult a voice coach who has native-level fluency, and practice in advance those words and phrases with them till you get it right. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but at least get the right sounds and emphasis. And please carefully consider the tone and accenting of your narration, so that it doesn’t inappropriately come across as broken English.
Heartbreaking story; avoid this narration
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Moving novel by important writer
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