More books I have read

'Tokyo Ueno Station' by Yu Miri

On life: “There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Tokyo Ueno Station is anchored in Ueno Park in Tokyo. The narrator appears to be dead, lingering in the park where he previously lived in an encampment of homeless people. It is strongly implied, though not actually made explicit, that he ended his own life in front of a train.

The narrator, Kazu, was the eldest of eight children from Fukushima prefecture. He got no education beyond elementary school as he had to go to work to help provide for his younger siblings. He came to Tokyo in 1963, aged 30, to work on the construction of the stadium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, leaving his wife and two small children back in their home village, and subsequently spent long periods away from his family, only going home twice a year. Kazu’s son Kōichi dies aged 21 in his flat in Tokyo, of unspecified causes. Aged 60, Kazu retires from work and returns home, but his wife dies a few years later. In due course Kazu’s granddaughter moves in with him to take care of him but one day, aged 67, he leaves her a note and returns to Tokyo, where he starts living in Ueno Park, one of several hundred homeless people there.

The novel paints a vivid and sympathetic picture of homelessness. The homeless community in Ueno Park suffer repeated short-notice evictions – e.g. when the Emperor is due to drive past to visit one of the museums nearby – and have to dismantle their huts and leave the park, before returning to the park once the ban is lifted and having to reassemble everything. Evictions from Ueno Park evidently became more common when the Tokyo city government was bidding for the 2020 Olympics.

Why does Kazu leave home and go back to Tokyo? The notion of him feeling a burden to his granddaughter didn’t seem quite sufficient to make someone voluntarily choose homelessness. It’s probably more that he only knows hard work, living in basic quarters, and he has never been used to living a settled life in an ordinary home. “I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to.”

Tokyo Ueno Station was published in 2019. The novel includes a longish Author’s Afterword that  provides some interesting context. Yu Miri is one of Japan’s “resident Koreans”, born and raised in Japan but with South Korean citizenship. This ethnic Korean community intermittently experiences hostility from the Japanese and she writes of a feeling of having outsider status in Japan, something that she says has given her empathy with those such as Kazu who, for other reasons, exist on the margins of Japanese society. She writes of the phenomenon of poor young men like Kazu leaving their villages to seek employment as labourers, doing back-breaking work only to end up, when they are too old for labouring work, homeless in Tokyo and wandering the streets.

One reviewer quoted sums up Tokyo Ueno Station as "a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair", which seems a reasonable description. It's very good though.

Footnote: Kazu’s family are practitioners of Pure Land Buddhism, something I had not heard of. There’s a remarkably tedious seven pages or so (in an otherwise non-tedious novel) devoted to the traditions of the sect and the names of temples and their founders.

'DallerGut Dream Department Store' by Miye Lee

The customers of the DallerGut Dream Department Store are asleep. Once people are asleep, they can go to the store to choose a dream, for which they “pay” in emotions afterwards. These emotions seem to be stored in the form of colourful bottled liquids, which are occasionally then drunk. No, I didn’t really get that bit either.

Penny’s hometown manufactures sleep products. Penny is a new employee at the DDDS – working there is coveted, so she is very pleased to have landed the job. Each floor of the department store sells a different type of dream. Given the choice of which floor of the store she wants to work on, Penny chooses the front desk, where she assists the experienced Weather. Behind the front desk is an Eyelid Scale, which predicts the visiting hours of regular customers. Once the eyelids stay closed, the store knows the customer will arrive soon.

There are a number of “dreammakers” who create the dreams sold in the store. Dreams from the ‘Big Five’ dreammakers are highly sought-after and expensive. Dreams are advertised before their release. Customers open the dreams to dream them. Dream payments are made with the customer’s post-dream emotion. The Dream Pay Systems software connects the customers’ dream payments to the safe.

I suppose it’s all meant as feel-good escapism. I don’t mind a bit of that, but I did think this was fairly mediocre. Discussing this book at Book Group, Claire admitted that she’d chosen it because she liked the colourful cover. Ali commented that the book read as though it had been written by AI, which was a tad harsh but I did see what she meant. Ruth kept drawing unfavourable comparisons with Roald Dahl, which I found a little odd but I think she had seen some loose similarities with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I hadn’t particularly, but I suppose maybe the sparkly multicoloured fantastical element. I don't get the sense that DDDS was written as a children’s book though.

I found the rendering into English of some of the dreammakers’ names irritatingly childish (Wawa Sleepland; Yasnoozz Otra; Babynap Rockabye) but maybe there are some cultural differences here – presumably the translator must have tried to create English equivalents in the same spirit as the Korean originals.

DallerGut Dream Department Store was first published in 2020, and in English in 2023, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee.

'Jennings and Darbishire' by Anthony Buckeridge

Mum’s friend Clemency recently offloaded a couple of tatty copies of books in the ‘Jennings’ series, and Mum passed on one each to Dave and me. This is a 1956 edition, with presumably the original cover, but mainly still intact.

The ‘Jennings’ series relates the doings of Jennings, his best friend Darbishire and their classmates in Form Three at Linbury Court Preparatory School, somewhere on the Sussex coast. Dave had a number of books in the series when we were kids, most of which I think I read as well as I always found them funny, and still do. Most of the ones Dave had were from the 1970s Collins reprint, with front cover photographs. The Wikipedia entry on the ‘Jennings’ series states that there were 24 novels in total.

The events of Jennings and Darbishire kick off on Jennings’ birthday, when he receives two presents that trigger the action of the rest of the book: a camera from his father and an Ideal Junior Printing Outfit from his Aunt Angela. Armed with these two things, Jennings decides to start a regular publication, the Form Three Times. Their attempts to generate material for the publication lead to various unfortunate events, or ‘bishes’ as the boys would say. A typical story arc: a misunderstanding with some French fishermen they are hoping to photograph leads to them having to smuggle raw fish back into school, which Jennings attempts to fry for breakfast in the school dark room, setting fire to a developing dish in the process. Caught by Mr Wilkins, Jennings attempts to hide the parcel of fish by stuffing it up the chimney in Mr Wilkins’ study, leading to convoluted attempts to get it out again before the master decides to light a fire.

Jennings and Darbishire was first published in 1954 and was - according to the Wikipedia entry - the fourth novel in the series.