No matter how large or small the community, there are homeless among us. And each one is a singular human being whose life once was different.
Tokyo Ueno Station, winner of the National Book Award for translated fiction, is a short tale by Yu Miri that examines the life of one homeless man, Kazu. It's a life that demanded and demanded and demanded. And no matter what he gave of what he had, it was never enough. And when people remained kind to him and he could not bear being a burden, he left.
After years of being one of the homeless denizens tossed back and forth by the government in one of Tokyo's largest parks, he is now a ghost who listens to others who still exist in their tents and thrown-together shelters of discarded items. He also listens to the kind of people who threw out those items.
These sections are hypnotic, nearly like watching the angels in Wings of Desire listen to human beings. They also serve to display the humanity of each individual. In a story from the New York Times, Miri said she interviewed homeless people in the park and writes "so that I can magnify the small voices of people who aren’t often heard.”
The calm tone in this novel, as with much of the translated Japanese fiction I've read, illuminates quiet moments brilliantly. To what purpose? Well, as Willy Loman once famously proclaimed, "Attention must be paid." In Tokyo Ueno Station, the roses painted by Redoute are used to show what paying attention can mean:
One cannot tell when or where each rose is blooming, whether it is in a garden or a flowerpot; whether it is sunny, or cloudy, or raining; whether it is morning, or noon, or night; whether it is spring, or summer, or autumn. Redoute, the man who painted these roses, died over a hundred seventy years ago. And the rose bushes that he studied are more than likely no longer living either. But once, somewhere, those roses were in bloom. And once, somewhere, a painter lived. And now, through these pieces of paper divorced from the reality of the past, like fantastical flower that do not exist in our world, these roses bloom.
Paying attention, seeing the blossoms that are souls, whether on the cusp of blooming or faded and shriveled, is shown well in Miri's work.