Walking on an autumn Saturday through Ueno Park, one of Tokyo¡¯s most popular attractions, novelist Yu Miri was stunned by how beautified the grounds seemed since her last visit several years earlier.
Pointing to a grove of trees where people were picnicking at a social distance, she recalled how the homeless used to congregate on the lawn in cardboard shelters covered in blue tarps.
That was the setting she re-created in her novel ¡°Tokyo Ueno Station,¡± which won the National Book Award for translated literature in the United States last week. Its narrator is a dead construction worker whose spirit loiters around these camps, where he and others who had fallen down the socioeconomic ladder spent their final living years.
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