A Ghost Is Born

On Yu Miri's "Tokyo Ueno Station" (translated by Morgan Giles)

Being an inherently conservative medium, there aren’t many novels that center on the homeless. Your classic hero’s journey involves setting out from a home and then coming back to it; if your hero is not leaving, it’s usually in defense of some kind of home, or even just a notion of it. The marriage plot, the inheritance plot, the adultery plot, all of these depend, in some way, on a home or homes. A character might be put out for a day or two, or between homes for a large section of a book, but true transience is rare; Knut Hamsun’s Hunger might be the closest major example, and there are plenty of memoirs about homelessness (Down and Out in Paris and London, for one), but very rarely do we have a narrator truly living rough. That alone would make Yu Miri’s 2014 novel Tokyo Ueno Station a distinctive outlier, but Miri takes it a step further by making her main character a ghost as well. Though the rules of ghosts are kind of shaky – if you’re haunting a place, do you live there? – this is likely the only novel narrated by a homeless ghost. (I’m unsure where a wandering spirit might fit into this schema, or if the afterlife is a home in itself, but we’ll just go with how the ghost self-identifies.) What might seem like a kind of gimmick – the doubled transience of the homeless ghost – quickly reveals itself as a means to explore the palimpsest of history and human experience, the many lives and worlds that overlap in the unseen.