51 pages • 1 hour read
Yu Miri, Transl. Morgan GilesTokyo Ueno Station
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Water
Without water, there is no life. Therefore, it is ironic that in this book, water symbolizes death more often than not. It has an almost suffocating presence, and many of the scenes described have in common a profusion of rain, wetness, and dampness. The end of the book is punctuated by catastrophic flooding that causes extreme death.
Water repeatedly appears in scenes related to death. Kazu repeats “it was raining” when he and Setsuko go to the morgue after Koichi’s death (50), though ironically, it is bright and sunny when he carries Koichi’s coffin out of the house. It is similarly raining when Kazu discovers Setsuko’s body, the second major loss in his life. Water appears in less concrete ways, too; when his mother calls him unlucky, Kazu compares her words to rain, and he also dreams of a bath scene shortly before his death by suicide. The one form of water that does not appear in these scenes is tears: Kazu repeatedly mentions his own inability to cry, a sign that grief, for him, manifests primarily as shock and denial.
As the novel enters into its final section, Kazu describes an unrelenting, cold rain. He feels himself becoming sick. The atmosphere is soaked, and the dampness pervades everything. Learning to escape the rain is an essential for the survival of the people of Ueno Park, and Kazu does this as he enters the adult movie theater and finds refuge from the rain. Water is not life-giving; instead, it is a harbinger of disease and death. This makes the moment of Kazu’s decision to die by suicide stand out, as it occurs during a brief break in the rain. The sudden clear sky mirrors Kazu’s sudden “enlightenment.” Even in this moment, however, Kazu notices lingering dark clouds, hinting that rain could start again; this foreshadows the fact that death does not bring him peace.
The novel’s final image is of Mari, Kazu’s granddaughter, drowning after her car has been swept out to sea by the tsunami of 2011. Kazu says, “As Mari’s car melted into darkness and I could no longer see it, I heard, from inside that darkness heavy with the weight of water over it, that sound” (179). Here, the water represents an enveloping darkness and ultimately death itself.
Birds
At various points in the narrative, Kazu draws the reader’s attention to birds. These include the white-breasted bird that he thinks is Koichi, as well as various other birds in Ueno Park, such as sparrows, ducks, and pigeons.
In the first instance, the white-breasted bird that he does not recognize and is unable to identify the breed of, Kazu believes that the spirit of his son is present in the bird. The bird, therefore, symbolizes reincarnation, or the transport of the soul. Twice, Kazu informs the reader that he wonders if the bird is Koichi. The first occasion, Kazu says, “A bird that was neither swallow, nor a wood pigeon nor a falcon, a bird with pure white breast that I had never seen before, flew down from the branch of a cherry tree […] I wondered if perhaps the bird was Koichi” (55). This occurs shortly after Koichi’s death, and Kazu is still in a state of shock; his thoughts are a sign of The Impact of Grief, as he seeks solace in the idea that Koichi is not lost forever. Setsuko seeks similar comfort, though she does so through conversation with the priest and through prayer.
In literature, birds sometimes represent freedom because they can fly, which defies the very laws of gravity. Many of Kazu’s observations of the people in Ueno Park include corresponding observations of birds. In these instances, the birds as a representation of freedom are reminders of what is unattainable for the unhoused people in the park. Other times, they are parallels of the unhoused population; a discussion about fewer sparrows in the park comes directly on the heels of Kazu wondering if officials plan to target the unhoused for “reduction.” Similarly, Kazu notices a pigeon “trying to obstruct a male or female’s path” (143), but it is ignored by everyone around it, just as the unhoused people in the park are invisible to visitors.
Noise
The novel begins and ends with reference to an unidentified sound. The first words of the novel, “There’s that sound again” (1), are echoed in the second to last sentence, “I heard, from inside that darkness heavy with the weight of water over it, that sound” (179). In both instances, Kazu is unable to indicate what the sound is, inferring that it is something beyond his ability to correctly name. The author leaves the interpretation of this sound up to the reader; it could be a sound only heard by those who have died, it could be a physical manifestation of his mental state, or it could simply be a reference to the sound of the oncoming train or the tsunami. There is also the possibility that the sound is true and raw silence.
In many of the scenes that Kazu describes, there is a near-constant abundance of noise. There are the sounds of modern commerce and industry, there are people talking and birds chirping, and there are the sounds of nature, like wind in the trees. Noise has a presence in the novel almost to the point where it is an off-stage character. Kazu fixates on particular sounds, like the grandfather clock in his home, as a parallel to his gradual loss of sensation after death—as a ghost, he describes being unable to feel, see, or hear the way he once could. Sound is also the main grounding feature of the novel, as Kazu is usually drawn out of his spiraling thoughts by conversations he overhears, no matter how trivial they may seem.
Noise is tied to time as conversations and sounds are often the catalyst for Kazu’s flashbacks. This nonlinear storytelling culminates in the overall circular nature of the novel, which links noise directly to incongruous moments in time. One moment, Kazu is in 2006; the next, he is in 2011. In the first few pages, he says he is “watching for [himself] on the day [he] first set foot on the platform at Ueno Station” (3), but when he hears “that sound” again, he jumps straight to a scene at Ueno Park. This disorienting experience mirrors Kazu’s confusion and instability and represents the fact that he is no longer bound by the rules of linear time.
