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.
Themes
The Influence of Poverty on Mental Health
Much of the novel revolves around poverty. In addition to Kazu’s story, Yu Miri describes the various ways that people find themselves unhoused, detailing both personal choices and external factors. Through Kazu, she also shows the impact of financial struggles on mental health, particularly for those born into generational poverty.
In his younger years, Kazu’s family struggled to make ends meet. His father had been a laborer and had strived to do whatever he could to make sure his family’s basic needs were met. One of Kazu’s first jobs was helping his father gather clams, but since there were so many others like his father, eventually, this source of meager income dried up. Kazu recalls his father having to fall into debt and the many ways the man tried to get himself out from under it. Often, he would hide from his creditors, leaving Kazu to lie to them. Of this, Kazu says,
I thought what a thing of sin poverty was, that there could be nothing more sinful than forcing a small child to lie. The wages of that sin were poverty, a wage that one could not endure, leading one to sin again, and as long as one could not pull oneself out of poverty, the cycle would repeat until death (39).
This background information sets the stage for Kazu’s mentality and provides context for his later decisions. From a young age, Kazu sees firsthand the stress, fear, and shame that come with debt. He understands that poverty forces people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t, like making their child lie for them. Kazu learns to put work first: He goes straight to work after elementary school and spends the majority of the rest of his life working hard to provide for his family.
For that very reason, Kazu rarely gets to see his family. Though he dedicates so much of his life to earning money for them, his lack of schooling or specialized skills limits the sort of work he can find. Most of it is demanding physical labor that takes him away from his hometown. Kazu is not the only person in this situation; he points out that many people like him moved to Tokyo before the 1964 Olympics, as a nationwide focus on urban development meant decent jobs in the city. Even when he is with his family, like when Setsuko gives birth to Koichi, Kazu is haunted by his financial state. What should be a joyous occasion—the birth of a child—is marred by memories of debt collectors taking away most of his family’s things and by the knowledge that he cannot afford the midwife he must, nonetheless, desperately locate.
In fables and fairytales, hard work is often rewarded, but this is not the case for Kazu. When Koichi and Setsuko die, Kazu can only think about how little time he spent with them. He focuses on the fact that he has few photos of them, that he never took his children to the zoo, and that he barely spent a year, total, in Setsuko’s presence, despite decades of marriage. Knowing he was able to provide for them financially, even if they weren’t rich, brings him no comfort.
Eventually, Kazu comes to believe that poverty is a force from which one cannot escape. When describing the other unhoused people at the park, he explains that, once, they were “normal” people, with homes and families. However, he says, “If you fall into a pit, you can climb out, but once you slip from a sheer cliff, you cannot step firmly into a new life again. The only thing that can stop you from falling is the moment of your death” (83). Abject poverty is the cliff to which Kazu refers, and this statement conveys his hopelessness and despair. Kazu also describes how the shame of being a burden drives unhoused people to distance themselves from their families; his friend Shige, for instance, purposely removes any identifying items from his person so that his family won’t be notified when he dies. Kazu himself leaves his daughter and granddaughter with only a goodbye note; he, too, cannot stand the thought of becoming a burden to them. While much of this mindset is influenced by his grief, part of his decision stems from his refusal to repeat the cycle and force a child—even an adult one—to do the labor of a parent.
Koichi and Setsuko’s deaths create a sense of nihilism in Kazu. Without them, Kazu feels that all his years of hard work are meaningless, and, thus, his entire life has been meaningless too. He makes repeated comments about how he simply survived but didn’t truly live and how life, in general, has no true beginning, end, or purpose. Poverty tangles with grief so inextricably that Kazu eventually decides to die by suicide on the off chance that it can reunite him with his family and bring him meaning and joy.
Invisible Classism in Japan and the Power of Circumstances
In conjunction with Kazu’s poverty, the broader themes of classism and circumstance are a major feature of the novel. Through Kazu’s narrations and observations, Yu Miri examines how Japanese society treats unhoused people, the effects of the remnants of historical class systems, and the way a person’s life changes drastically depending on the circumstances into which they are born.
Kazu overhears many seemingly random conversations between strangers passing through Ueno Park, where he used to live with other unhoused people. In one such conversation, two people discuss the health consequences of eating too much chocolate. One says, “They say you really shouldn’t overdo it with chocolate,” and the other person responds, “Everything in moderation. I mean, I eat sweets, you know. Six sticks of strawberry Pocky is my limit, though” (94-95). This trivial conversation reveals much about class disparities. First, the entire concept of eating anything in “moderation” can only be considered by those who live lives of excess. For those who do not have to worry about where their next meal comes from, moderation is a worthy goal. Limiting oneself to six sticks of Pocky is a good thing when one could otherwise indulge without limitations. It is telling, however, that these people have this conversation in earshot of unhoused people, for whom there are no such things as “excess” or “moderation.” When the lack of food security is a real and ever-present concern, self-imposed limitations tend to manifest as necessary rationing, rather than some kind of health or fitness goal.
It is also heavily implied that these people—and most of the other passersby—do not seem to notice the unhoused people near them, which represents another way that class distinctions manifest in the novel. Generally, unhoused people are simply ignored, as if they don’t even exist. When they are noticed, they are treated as public nuisances or deemed uneducated and irresponsible. Kazu says, “To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone” (147). When the emperor and his wife visit the area, the encampment is evicted to give the false impression that a housing problem does not exist. Meanwhile, Kazu says,
The people passing through on their way to work or school at their usual time might not even have noticed that no homeless person sat on the benches or that the blue tarps and cardboard huts had been removed. It wasn’t their homes that had been cleaned up; they weren’t the ones who had been chased out of the park (166).
Kazu points out that the posted sign, which told the unhoused people when to be out of the park, was written in an odd combination of regular and “simplified” Japanese, as if the person who wrote it assumed that unhoused people couldn’t read.
Throughout the novel, Kazu mentions many historical events that, directly or indirectly, impacted the lives of unhoused people like himself. He points out one unhoused man, who describes losing everything after the economic bubble of the 1980s burst, causing a major economic collapse. He references stories that occurred during the Meiji Restoration, which occurred before he was born yet nonetheless had an influence on his life due to the semi-recent abolishment of the feudal class system. He also talks about the post-World War II push for westernized urbanization and the Tokyo Olympics, which drew many people from rural communities to Tokyo but then left them without prospects and without any government focus on their home communities. Though so much of Tokyo was built due to the efforts of laborers like Kazu, their efforts go unacknowledged.
Lastly, Kazu draws many parallels between himself and the imperial family. He points out that he and the emperor were born in the same year, that Koichi was born on the same day as the crown prince, and that he purposely borrowed the “Ko” in “Koichi” from the crown prince’s name. He juxtaposes his life—filled with poverty and weighed down by grief and despair—with the lives of the imperial family’s, who he describes as “innocent” and “never [having known] struggle, envy, or aimlessness” (168-69). These comparisons serve to point out the injustice of circumstance. Had Kazu been born into a family with money, his life likely would have been completely different. It’s heavily implied that the only true difference between the emperor and Kazu is the circumstances of their births. There is, of course, no guarantee that Kazu’s life would have been perfect—but had he been born into different circumstances, he at least would not have been invisible.
The Impact of Grief
In addition to poverty, Kazu’s life is notably marked by grief and loss. This theme is rigorously explored as Kazu learns of the death of his son, and again when he discovers his wife’s body beside him.
For Kazu, grief often manifests as shock and denial. Kazu says, “I hadn’t cried since I’d heard about Koichi’s death either. I could not comprehend it. I could not accept the sudden death of my only son at the age of twenty-one as a reality” (53). The motif of water is prominent in the book—therefore, it is tragically ironic that the form of water most commonly associated with grief, tears, is not present. Kazu also comments a few times on his surprise that Koichi is no longer in the world; during one of the funeral services, he says it’s hard to believe that Koichi can’t hear the chiming of the grandfather clock in their home.
In addition to shock, Kazu also describes denial. The reality of the death is beyond the scope of his ability to process what has happened. During the mourning period, Kazu twice sees a bird and wonders if it is indeed Koichi reincarnated. Kazu says, “The cherry petals continued to fall, and I wondered if perhaps the bird was Kōichi” (55). Later, Kazu sees the bird again. This time he had been drinking, and he says, “Then something swept into the corner of my eye—it was the bird, the one I’d seen on my way to my neighbor’s house in the morning, the white-breasted bird, it really was Kōichi after all—but those thoughts might have come to me only after people poured me a few glasses of sake and I was quite drunk” (69). In both cases, Kazu wishes that his son were still with him. One can see the internal conflict in Kazu as he tries to negotiate with himself in order to make some sense of his loss. Perhaps Koichi is dead, but his spirit is still present—this is what Kazu seems willing to believe.
Setsuko’s death adds a new form of grief: guilt. Setsuko dies next to Kazu during the night; additionally, just a few days prior, she’d commented that she thought she would die “when the cicadas are singing” (127), which came true. For these reasons, Kazu feels immense guilt over her death. He explicitly states that he views himself as Setsuko’s killer because he did not notice her dying beside him and did not wake up to help her. The weight of Setsuko’s death does not sit separately from the weight of Koichi’s; instead, this grief piles onto Kazu. It is clear from his narration that his thoughts are still consumed by these losses; for instance, he points out that two women conversing nearby are around the same age Setsuko was when she died.
For those who have suffered monumental loss, life is never the same. They must learn to live without the presence of people who meant so much to them. For Kazu, this takes the form of deep, constant sorrow. Kazu says, “Before, I used to wake up, think about where I was, what I was doing, what day it was, then open my eyes, but afterward I was woken up by one fact alone: Kōichi was dead” (72). The new reality of life without the loved one is the central thought and, as Kazu suggests here, is often the first waking thought. Eventually, surviving loved ones develop mechanisms to deal with these kinds of pervasive thoughts; Kazu uses compartmentalization. He says, “The memories of the past that I could not get rid of were all contained in a box. And time had sealed the lid. A box whose lid is sealed by time should not be opened. Were it opened, I would be plunged at once into the past” (104). Kazu shifts these tragic memories to a place within his psyche that he knows he should not open because doing so would also open the gates for his grief to pour out. This enables him to move forward in spite of such terrible loss, but ultimately, it does not bring him solace.
