Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)

Praise for Tokyo Ueno Station and Yu Miri

“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

“Glorious.” —New York Times Book Review

”[A] relatively slim novel that packs an enormous emotional punch, thanks to Yu’s gorgeous, haunting writing and Morgan Giles’ wonderful translation…. Yu does a magnificent job exploring the effects of all kinds of loss on the human psyche. Tokyo Ueno Station is a stunning novel, and a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair.” —NPR

“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

“Spare, indelible.” —O, the Oprah magazine

“A novel of the world we all share — not what we expect from a ghost story but frightening all the same.” —Rumaan Alam, Washington Post

“Coolly meditative, subtly spectral… Yu’s spare, empathetic prose beautifully expresses Kazu’s perspective on the passage of time; he feels a ‘constant absence from the present, an anger toward the future.’ This slim 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)

Yu Miri is a Japanese author of Korean descent, who writes plays, prose fiction, and essays. She has published over twenty books and is the recipient of Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa. Her novel Tokyo Ueno Station won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Following the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, she relocated there and has since opened a bookstore and theatre space.

Morgan Giles is a Japanese translator and reviewer based in London.

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