Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Published in Japan in 2014; published in translation in Great Britain in 2019 and in the US by Riverhead Books on June 23, 2020

Having a familiarity with Japanese history would probably help a reader dive into the full depth of Tokyo Ueno Station. I lack that familiarity, although some googling and consulting the SamuraiWiki (yes, there is such a thing) helped me understand references to the conflict between the Shōgitai and Imperial troops, leading to the Battle of Ueno. In addition, a student of Buddhism, or a reader who is familiar with each of the novel’s references to eastern religious rituals and beliefs, will likely have a more nuanced perspective on Tokyo Ueno Station than I did. Such are the difficulties and rewards of tackling Japanese fiction. The novel nevertheless conveys universal truths, regardless of and apart from history and religion, including the pain of loss and the search for meaning in an apparently random universe.

Kazu, the novel’s narrator, tells the story from his memories of being alive. Those memories are fading, as is his ability to distinguish colors and smells. At the age of 67, Kazu began living in Ueno Park in central Tokyo. By 2010, apparently the year of his death, he was 73. He collected cans for recycling to earn the pocket money that helped him survive. Kazu often wondered whether survival is worthwhile. His status as a ghost suggests that he decided his pain was unendurable. Yet he still wanders through the park and the train station, still listens to conversations, still watches when the emperor’s car drives past, the emperor waving at the people lining the sidewalks, probably without really noticing them. Death has not changed Kazu much; certainly, it has not removed the pain. Fading away is his best hope for peace.

Kazu’s life shared milestones with the emperor’s — they are the same age, their children were born on the same day, the park that became his home was a gift to Tokyo from the emperor — yet their lives are a study in contrast. Kazu worked as a laborer, traveling from one construction project to another. He was rarely home to visit his wife and child. His son died in the middle of life. Shortly after Kazu’s retirement, when he finally had time for his wife, she died sleeping next to him after he came home drunk. Kazu wondered whether his wife cried out in pain, whether he could have saved her if he had not fallen into a drunken sleep. He carried the weight of both deaths. After his granddaughter came to live with him, he decided a 21-year old woman should not be burdened by an old man, so he left her a note saying he was moving to Tokyo and that she should not look for him.

Kazu tells us that the homeless do not usually tell each other stories, but a couple of the men he encounters in the park tell him about their past lives. A sense of guilt and shame is their unifying feature. Many of the park’s homeless occupants come to a sad end, sometimes by being beaten to death for sport by Tokyo teens. Their stories are in sharp contrast to the snippets of conversation that Kazu overhears, the idle gossip or comparison of purchases at the mall, the chatterers oblivious to the lives around them.

Tokyo Ueno Station suggests the importance of noticing the unnoticed. “To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone.” Watching a young man read the prayers for health or success at a temple reminds Kazu that, when he was a young man, he “had no interest in other people’s hopes or setbacks.” The experience of homelessness triggered an empathic awareness of the world that Kazu lacked when he lived a more fortunate life. It is an empathy that government lacks, as he learns when park management displaces the homeless and their cardboard huts so that the imperial family can enjoy the park and its museums without being troubled by reality.

Yet empathy cannot cure the sadness that Kazu feels. The sorrow of death has captured him. Whether he has imagined or witnessed his granddaughter’s fate is unclear, but he has seen enough death to consider whether the time has come to for him to die.

Tokyo Ueno Station might be read as a critique of the Japanese government, its post-war drive to become an economic superpower at the expense of family and a meaningful existence. On a more personal level, the novel stands as an examination of the choices (or lack of choices) that shape life and death. The novel tells a bleak story in spare prose that suits its subject matter, but it encourages readers to recognize the importance of the only life we have and the value of all that lives that we choose not to see.

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Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe

Published by Tor Books on June 30, 2020

A sequel to A Borrowed Man, Interlibrary Loan is Gene Wolfe’s final novel. Wolfe reportedly turned it over to his publisher shortly before his death, but it feels incomplete. Perhaps if Wolfe had survived, an editor might have wanted him to flesh out the story, or at least to provide additional context for the ending, but Wolfe died and the manuscript is what we have, take it or leave it.

The 22nd century world established in A Borrowed Man makes cloned authors available to library patrons. Check out a cookbook author and you can get a hands-on cooking lesson. Check out Ern A. Smithe, a “recloned” mystery writer, and perhaps you can get help solving a mystery.

The background is interesting but it was largely established in A Borrowed Man. I’m not sure that Interlibrary Loan adds anything noteworthy to the concept.

The plot sends Smithe and a couple of female reclones (one a cookbook author, the other a romance novelist) to a smaller library on an interlibrary loan. Smithe prefers the library where he was residing but any chance to be checked out is welcome. Being checked out once a year pretty much guarantees his future. A prolonged period of being ignored might cause the library system to burn him as an unwanted book.

The little girl who checks out Smithe at her mother’s direction explains that a dark spooky shape invades her mother’s bedroom at night. The mother, Adah Fevre, wants Smithe to solve a mystery involving a treasure map pasted into a book. The map has hallucinatory properties. Why this should be true is, like much of the plot, is never adequately explained. The beginning of the story seems like a collection of false starts that might have been trimmed away if Wolfe had lived to give the manuscript the rewrite it needs.

The story sends Smithe and a reclone named Audrey (famed for writing books about her adventures as an explorer) to Corpse Island, where Adah’s estranged husband finds cadavers that his anatomy students can dissect. The husband is busy having sex with the reclone romance writer (who doesn’t seem to mind) and Smithe gets busy with Audrey (to their mutual satisfaction, at least in Smithe’s opinion). Adah is jealous but Adah is also crazy so nobody pays much attention to her unless she’s holding a knife.

Something like an adventure story that turns into a treasure hunt follows the arrival on Corpse Island. A treasure is located but its purpose or properties are never explained. Reclones come and go, sometimes returning as different reclones of the same dead author. It’s all a bit confusing, made all the more so by an unexplained portal to an ambiguous place through which nebulous beings travel for mysterious reasons. Perhaps Wolfe intended to elaborate on the other world in a later book. Perhaps he simply sent off an unfinished manuscript because he didn’t want his estate to refund his advance for failing to submit the book. We’ll never know.

The story and the relationships are sort of intriguing, but the novel’s merits are balanced by its flaws. Fans of A Borrowed Man might want to read Interlibrary Loan simply to immerse themselves further in the strange future that Wolfe created. Other readers might find it more satisfying to read or reread Wolfe’s earlier and better books.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry

Published by HarperCollins/Custom House on June 30, 2020

Knowing only that the book had something to do with lights in the sky, I thought Nine Shiny Objects might be a science fiction novel about first contact with aliens. It isn’t. The novel is more of a generational saga. The only aliens are Mexicans and Asians who immigrated to the United States to give their children the hope of a better life. The hope is realized for some of those children but not for the one who dies.

The story is told in nine chapters, each focusing on a different character, each beginning about five or ten years after the last chapter ends. The novel spans a period from 1947 to 1987. While the chapters are linked by certain locations and events, they read very much like self-contained short stories. Brian Castleberry’s goal is to show connections, cause-and-effect relationships, actions that set events in motion, spiraling into unexpected outcomes. While the characters and their lives are intriguing, I’m not sure the stories cohere in a way that creates a unified story.

The novel begins with Oliver Danville, who reads about a sighting of nine objects in the sky at Mount Rainier. Danville makes a pilgrimage, convinced that he will encounter a guiding intelligence that will give meaning to his aimless life. As he approaches his destination, he meets a farming family. Saul and Martha Penrod agree to join him on his quest, leaving behind Paul and Jack, their two adult sons. For years Paul will carry a grudge against Danville, who (in his view) lured their parents away, never to return. Jack later wonders whether that event instilled the anger that motivated the rest of Paul’s life, the hatred of hippies and commies and nonwhites, of anyone who did not fit within his narrow vision of what America should be.

Danville has a sister named Eileen, who in the next chapter falls in love with a waitress named Claudette, a character who reappears at the novel’s end. Eileen believes her brother, who now calls himself the Tzadi Sophit, had a vision, that he carries a message transmitted to humans by aliens. He is, in other words, the leader of a cult that might be a forerunner of Scientology.

The novel’s focal point, however, is a Long Island real estate development called Eden Gardens, a place that Eileen designed and that Seeker Industries built. Eden Gardens is on the outskirts of Ridge Landing, a community that is barely tolerant of its Jewish residents and that relies on a racial covenant to exclude people of color. Eden Gardens was imagined as a shared community and disparaged as a commune, a tract of houses that sat empty until 1957 when, in the dead of night, the Seekers’ leader filled it with his racially and ethnically mixed followers. Paul Penrod, an avowed racist, is there when Eden Gardens is being built, and plays a key role in the violence that shapes the rest of the novel.

From that foundation, the story lurches onward. A young black man named Stanley West witnessed the events in Eden Gardens. In a chapter that takes place a few years later, we learn how West's short stay in Ridge Landing affected the course of his life. A songwriter stars in a chapter that tangentially reintroduces Max Feldberg, who was a child of dubious parenting in Ridge Landing. That chapter culminates in ambiguous events involving another perceived cult that sends shock waves into the future. We learn about that event in a chapter that focuses on one of the Ridge Landing bigots who resents hearing about it from Morley Safer on 60 Minutes. By the end of the chapter, the bigoted character hints at the possibility of learning to overcome the senseless hate that has infected her community.

A popular radio talk show host with an affinity for conspiracy stories carries a chapter. Max’s daughter carries another. The last chapter brings back Paul and Jack. One of them is dead and the other doesn’t seem to realize, or care, that he’s interacting with a ghost.

At its best, Nine Shiny Objects tells a story of intolerance and its consequences. Without preaching, it touches on some of the low points in American history, from McCarthyism and entrenched racism to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. There is a bit of hope in the story, if only because the reader understands that prejudice endured by gay and black and Mexican characters will inspire civil rights struggles that will slowly erode (but not defeat) bigotry. Sadly, we know from the nightly news that the struggle must continue through future generations if the American ideal of equality and progress is ever to be realized.

At its worst, the novel is a surprisingly vague in critical moments. Max, for example, seems to have been leading a watered-down version of a Manson-like cult, but I would have enjoyed hearing Morley Safer's report given the absence of detail that we get from Castleberry. The same is true of Danville’s cult, about which we learn too little. These omissions seem odd, given Castleberry’s talent for delivering fully formed characters and imagining in depth the communities in which his characters reside.

I regarded the last chapter’s reliance on a ghost as having gone one contrivance too far. I’m not sure that all parts of the story contribute to a cohesive whole; at times, the novel seems a bit wobbly. As is sometimes true of first novels, Castleberry’s ambition may have exceeded his ability to tell a manageable story. The novel's drama tends to get lost in the wealth of background detail. But I love the complexity of the characters, the fluidity of Castleberry’s prose, the ways in which the chapters vary from each other, and the core message that envisioning a perfect community is much easier than building one.

RECOMMENDED

Highfire by Eoin Colfer

Published by Harper Perennial on January 28, 2020

I don’t make a habit of reading books in which dragons play a central role — or any role — but Highfire delivered the offbeat humor that the description promised. It’s hard to take a dragon seriously when he wears a Flashdance t-shirt and cargo shorts.

Vern (a/k/a Wyvern, a/k/a Lord Highfire) is, so far as he knows, the last dragon on Earth. Humans “managed to all but extinctify dragons back the day with nothing but crossbows and malicious intent,” leaving Vern with a serious grudge against the human race. He lays low in a Louisiana swamp, where he is occasionally forced to teach the alligators who’s boss.

Although Vern does his best to stay away from humans, he crosses paths with a teenager named Everett “Squib” Moreau. Squib has taken a summer job running moonshine and untaxed cigarettes for Bodi Irwin. He hopes to pay off his mother’s debts so that he and his mother can move away from the swamp. One motivation for moving is to protect his mother from Regence Hooke, whose duty to enforce the law has been corrupted by the cash he makes running errands for a drug cartel. Hooke has his eye on Squib’s mother but he’s preoccupied with a scheme to advance his career by running guns from Louisiana (where they are cheap and plentiful) to California (where they are regulated and therefore command a higher price).

Squib is transporting moonshine through the swamp when he witnesses Hooke commit a murder. Fleeing before he can be identified, Squib comes upon Vern. He flees again before Vern can toast him. With both Vern and Hooke chasing after him, thinks look bleak for Squib. Circumstances nevertheless conspire to turn Squib into Vern’s employee, as Vern needs someone to make his beer runs, his mogwai buddy Waxman having gone into hibernation.

The plot generally involves Squib’s effort to stay alive as Vern and Hooke go to war against each other. You would think a dragon would have the upper hand, but Vern is getting old and he doesn’t always have the oil in his system that he needs to fuel his fire. Hooke, on the other hand, is heavily armed and can call upon the resources of a cartel for assistance. The novel culminates in a glorious battle of the bayou.

If the plot sounds silly, it isn’t meant to be anything else. The story works because Eoin Colfer writes a laugh or two into every page. Colfer litters the text with jokes, inventive dialog, and commentary that is both irreverent and irrelevant (Vern hates the way dragons are depicted on Game of Thrones but the song “Blue Bayou” brings a tear to his eye).

The novel does have a serious message about prejudice and tolerance — in this case, prejudice against humans, some of whom are admittedly intolerable. “Humans, dragons, mogwai —ain’t no bad species nor good species,” Waxman tells Vern, who sort of agrees by the end of the novel, given the efforts that a few decent humans make to save his dragon skin (before it sheds). Replacing “species” with “races” brings the message closer to home, but Highfire isn’t a preachy novel. It is instead a very funny novel, one that makes me glad I overcame my own prejudice against books that feature dragons.

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The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian

Published by Doubleday on March 17, 2020

The Red Lotus is the name of a plague that has been weaponized as a bioweapon. It is a bit chilling to read about a plague in the midst of a pandemic, but the pandemic discussion is prescient. Says one character: “Got to be ready for the next pandemic. Got to have new antibiotics. Got to know what we’re up against. I mean, it’s coming, and New York City is the perfect place for a catastrophe. We have lots of people living in very close quarters.” Chris Bohjalian got that right.

The Red Lotus plague is carried by rats, although the weaponized version can spread from person to person. We learn quite a bit more than I needed to know about the rat world. Whether Vietnamese rats, having been exposed to Agent Orange, have evolved to be tougher than New York rats, which have been exposed to New Yorkers, is a question that preoccupies some of the characters. Saying much more about the nature of the plague might reveal spoilers. Instead, let’s look at how the plot sets up.

Alexis Remnick is an ER doctor who has a history of teenage angst that involved cutting herself. Now she blocks the pain by cutting her patients and sewing them back together, a task that helps her tend to herself by tending to others. Alexis met Austin Harper when he came to the ER for treatment of a gunshot wound, having been shot for apparently random reasons while playing darts in a bar. One thing leads to another and before long, Alexis and Austin are going bicycling in Vietnam, where Austin feels the need to pay his respects to relatives who were wounded or killed during the war.

Austin disappears in Vietnam. When his body is found, the police conclude that he was the victim of a hit-and-run while biking by himself. Alexis identifies his body in the morgue, but she also inspects it from a physician’s perspective, taking note of a puncture wound in his hand that isn’t consistent with a bicycling accident.

Back in America, Alexis meets with Austin’s parents and learns that the story he told about the war experiences of his relatives was bogus. Alexis hires a private investigator named Ken Sarafian to help her uncover the truth about Austin's death. A Vietnamese cop, an FBI agent stationed in southeast Asia, and friends of Alexis all play varying roles in helping Alexis understand what Austin was up to in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, it had something to do with rats. Intermixed with those chapters are chapters that follow the bad guys who had something to do with Austin’s death, or with rats, or both.

For the most part, characterization is strong. I’m not sure I quite bought Alexis’ need as an adult to get out her X-Acto knife and ponder the merits of once again being “the captain of her own pain” by cutting herself. Maybe old habits die hard, but it struck me as a contrivance in an adult who has made something of herself. Alexis is a smart, resourceful, and likeable character who would have earned just as much sympathy without the cutting.

While I didn’t entirely buy into the plot — Austin’s motivation for his actions is less than satisfying — I was carried along by Bohjalian’s smooth prose. The story is engaging because it requires some concentration to keep track of all the moving pieces. All of the pieces come together in an ending that isn’t particularly surprising until the epilog comes along. If for no other reason than its timely reminder that the United States should always be prepared for a pandemic, The Red Lotus is a thriller that merits attention.

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