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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- Unabridged
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It is 1968 in rural Australia and lonely Tom Hope can't make heads or tails of Hannah Babel. Newly arrived from Hungary, Hannah is unlike anyone he's ever met - she's passionate, artistic, and fiercely determined to open sleepy Hometown's first bookshop. Despite the fact that Tom has only read only one book in his life, the two soon discover an astonishing spark. Recently abandoned by an unfaithful wife - and still missing her sweet son, Peter - Tom dares to believe that he might make Hannah happy.
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Listener beware
- By Little old lady from Iowa on 06-11-23
By: Robert Hillman
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Exile and the Kingdom
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.
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So good!
- By Christopher A. Douglas on 10-24-24
By: Albert Camus
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The Road Home
- By: Rose Tremain
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Abridged
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Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008, The Road Home is the best-selling story of Lev, a middle-aged migrant from Eastern Europe, who moves to London in search of work after losing his wife and job. Lev's London is awash with money, celebrity and complacency. The world Tremain creates is both convincing and poignant.
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OK - nice narration - good characters
- By bea on 02-21-11
By: Rose Tremain
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A Lush and Seething Hell
- Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
- By: John Hornor Jacobs
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The award-winning and critically-acclaimed master of horror returns with a pair of chilling tales - both never-before-published in print or audio - that examine the violence and depravity of the human condition. Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul.
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Great idea, tarnished by modern politics
- By Phil on 04-28-21
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Foster
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
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A story that will stay with me a long time
- By CTKG on 11-01-22
By: Claire Keegan
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Autumn
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
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Incredible use of language
- By Mary on 03-06-17
By: Ali Smith
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Astonishing Ethan Hawke Performance
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What listeners say about Tokyo Ueno Station
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Billye Kay
- 03-07-24
The Only Constant is Displacement
Tokyo Ueno Station by Yū Miri (Author), Morgan Giles (Author), Johnny Heller (Narrator) is a wonderful mixture of styles. The main character is an unhoused day laborer and former family man who is now deceased. The story is secular and modern. Yet, at the same time,it carries with it a very traditional and spiritual tone and energy. The writing is outstanding, filled with rich detail and compelling historical and artistic references. The narration performance by Johnny Heller enhances the impact of the story. I would recommend this book to anyone working on themselves. I would also recommend this book to fans of Japanese culture.
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- J. Trimble
- 05-05-23
Poor narrator, meandering story but moments of greatness
As others have noted the narrator was, bluntly, awful. His whining plaintive delivery ruined some nicely written poignant prose. The story wandered, though, repeated certain plot points as if the author had forgotten the previous mentions, and I found the protagonist vacuous & not particularly likable. Honestly if this book had been longer I probably would’ve stopped listening.
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- Donovan Porter
- 08-21-24
Very sad story but beautiful
Loved the story very moving, learned about Tokyo and homelessness, families and love. Very well done
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- Chuck Safris
- 08-06-20
Raw
Strips off my stereotypes of Japan and reveals a believable, perhaps common story of hardship and survival.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Joy Kim
- 12-12-22
Awful narrator
It was hard to concentrate on the book as the narrator butchered Japanese names and words. What a shame since the book is quite good. Better to read in print. What a waste of my money and time…
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- Kani
- 06-18-23
Heartbreaking story; avoid this narration
First my thoughts on the book, then on the narration:
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.
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2 people found this helpful
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- S. Frederick
- 02-27-22
Moving novel by important writer
For Japanese speakers the mispronounced place names may be jarring, but good reading overall. Great short novel.
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- Cristina I.
- 02-28-23
short story about life and hardships
Throws a different perspective on Japan too. It strips the mysterious and glamorous coat and shows real people with real-life problems.
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- Rose
- 12-04-20
Goods story, great translation, poor narration
The story is moving though a bit predictable. The translation is smooth and natural.
The narrator has trouble pronouncing Japanese words and names, making me cringe at times.
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6 people found this helpful
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- josue hernandez
- 11-05-21
Boring and cringe narration
I blame myself for expecting something else from this book. I expected this book to be a ghost-story but from the perspective of the ghost at a Japanese train station etc.. I was very wrong, but still gave it a chance because it’s not the book’s fault that I was full of assumptions.
Either way, the book was just super boring and couldn’t engage. I think it may have been due to the narrator whom is a white guy that sounds like a Latino trying to speak Japanese. Apparently he is very sought after for his voice; but due to the cultural aspect of this book it was just cringe. I almost guarantee my experience would have been a bit better if we had a different narrator.
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