THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020 N C5TOKYO — Walking on an autumn Saturday
through Ueno Park, one of this city’s most
popular attractions, the 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 re-
called how the homeless used to congregate
on the lawn in cardboard shelters covered
in blue tarps.
That was the setting she recreated in her
novel “Tokyo Ueno Station,” which this fall
won the National Book Award for translated
literature. Its narrator is a dead construc-
tion worker whose spirit loiters around
these camps, where he and others who had
fallen down the socioeconomic ladder spent
their final years.
“Japan is so clean and there is also this
clean image,” Yu said. “But there is also this
feeling of not letting people see dirty or ‘un-
acceptable’ things.” As a society, she added,
Japan “pushes out the things that they don’t
want others to see into hiding.”
In “Tokyo Ueno Station,” which River-
head published in the United States in June,
she uncovers that hidden world. Drawing
on interviews with people she met in the
park, she captures details like the man who
sleeps with a “large translucent bag of scav-
enged aluminum cans tucked between his
legs,” or the cardboard shanty where the
garments hanging on a “bamboo broom-
stick protruding from the hut were women’s
underwear.”
In the delicate ecosystem of the home-
less, the narrator, Kazu, explains how con-
venience stores leave expired food near
dumpsters so that “if we went before the
trash was collected, we could claim any-
thing we wanted.” A friend uses his meager
money to buy tuna and kibble for a cat he
has adopted, even before he buys food for
himself.
Bringing these often-veiled people to life
is “the reason I am a writer,” Yu, 52, said.
“I’m kind of like a parabola antenna, so that
I can magnify the small voices of people
who aren’t often heard.”
According to Japanese government data,
the number of homeless people around the
country has dropped to about 4,500 now
from more than 25,000 in 2003. But some
private researchers suggest the current
number is higher. Local media reported that
the federal government pushed many of the
homeless out of Ueno Park and other tourist
attractions to prepare for the 2020 Tokyo
Olympics, now postponed until 2021, though
officials deny this.
Yu based details in “Tokyo Ueno Station,”
first published in Japan in 2014, on conver-
sations with homeless people she met in the
park starting more than a decade ago. Kazu,
a migrant worker from Fukushima, where
the 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered
a nuclear meltdown and subsequent mass
evacuations, sprang from a series of 600
conversations that Yu conducted for a local
radio program after the disaster.
Laura Perciasepe, a senior editor at Riv-
erhead, said she appreciated how Yu wove
together social criticism with a harrowing
individual portrait. “The book is an indict-
ment of capitalism, and an elegy to those it
leaves behind,” Perciasepe wrote in an
email. “But the novel is also quite personal
and intimate, about a family and this man.”
Yu’s own connection to Fukushima,
where she moved in 2015, runs deep. Her
mother, a refugee from the Korean War who
fled to Japan from South Korea in a small
boat, landed in a village in Fukushima that
was eventually flooded by a dam that
served as a source of hydropower for Tokyo.
Morgan Giles, who translated “Tokyo
Ueno Station” into English, said she was ini-
tially drawn to the novel because she had
been reading other works about the
Fukushima disaster. But Yu’s story, she
said, “resonated much more globally. So
many people are living in regions stripped
of their resources and people and forgotten
for that sacrifice.”
Yu is the eldest of four children. Her fa-
ther, also the son of Korean immigrants,
worked at a pachinko gambling parlor and
was often abusive, she said, spending most
of his income betting on horses or playing
poker. Her mother supported the family as ahostess at a cabaret club in Yokohama, Ja-
pan’s second-largest city. A younger
brother was violent — he once took a base-
ball bat to the windows of the house, draw-
ing the police — and her parents divorced
when Yu was a child.
As an ethnic Korean — known in Japan as
Zainichi — from a poor family, she was bul-
lied in school. Classmates called her a
“germ” and would refuse to eat lunch when
it was her turn to serve the food. She recalls
that a teacher, apparently offended by her
shyness, demanded to know: “Can’t you
speak Japanese?”
Literature became a refuge, particularly
Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
William Faulkner and Truman Capote.
“Books were the escape room for my soul,”
Yu said, and she often used them to conceal
her face from classmates.
Because of the discrimination and pov-
erty she experienced, she identifies with
the struggles of her fictional characters.
“When I was a child, I didn’t belong any-
where,” she said. “So I feel like that’s what I
am writing about when I write about home-
less people or people on the edge of society.”
Deborah Smith, the founder of Tilted
Axis, a nonprofit publisher that translates
Asian writers into English and originally
published “Tokyo Ueno Station” in Britain,
said Yu writes about those “who are not
part of any kind of officially projected im-
age” of Japan.
“She writes about their lives, not only
with force and anger and realism, but also
with great beauty and quite experi-
mentally,” said Smith, herself a translator ofKorean writers.
When Yu was 14, she ran away to Atami, a
seaside town south of Tokyo, where she in-
tended to drown herself. When that attempt
failed, she started climbing a fence to get to
the top of a building from which she planned
to jump.
A janitor came to her aid and took her
home to his wife, who served her dinner.
She has never forgotten the couple’s kind-
ness, or the fresh lychee they served for
dessert.
“That was the first time I had ever had
that fruit, and it was so delicious and cold,”
Yu recalled. The taste, she said, somehow
jolted her into giving the couple her father’s
phone number, so they could call him to
come pick her up.
But her depression persisted, and she
tried several more times to kill herself. She
left home for good when she was 16, after
waking up one night to find her mother hov-
ering over her with a knife, and wound up in
a theater group in Tokyo. (She said she and
her mother have yet to mend their relation-
ship.)
Yu moved in with one of the directors,
who was then 39. They started a romantic
relationship, an arrangement that she ac-
knowledges, “under current law, was ille-
gal.” But he encouraged her creative talent,
and she started writing plays, one of which
won a prize and attracted the attention of
editors who urged her to write a novel.
When an excerpt from her autobiographi-
cal first novel appeared in a magazine, the
woman who was the basis of a central char-
acter sued Yu for violation of privacy and
defamation, and a court stopped that novel
from ever being published in full. Her first
published novel, “Full House,” however,
won a prize for debut fiction when Yu was
26.
“Since then I have written every day,” she
said. “It’s just how I live. Life itself is writ-
ing.”
Her only other novel translated into Eng-
lish, “Gold Rush,” depicts a nihilistic society
in which a 14-year-old heir to a pachinko
parlor resorts to violence. Yu based it in
part on a real teenager who had killed sev-
eral people and on the pachinko world in
which she grew up. She is now working on a
sequel to “Gold Rush” while Giles trans-
lates another of her autobiographical nov-
els, “The End of August.”
In addition to writing, Yu has opened a
bookstore in Minami Soma, one of the
Fukushima villages that was evacuated af-
ter the nuclear disaster, where she now
lives. She wanted to offer returning resi-
dents and students a safe place to connect
with others in the community, although the
pandemic currently curtails activity at the
shop.
Accepting the National Book Award, she
thanked the people of her new home. “I
would like to share this joy with the people
of Minami Soma, who are on a path of hard-
ship after the earthquake, tsunami and nu-
clear disaster,” she said by video. “This is
for you.”A Novelist Attuned to the Quietest Voices
Yu Miri’s ‘Tokyo Ueno Station’
is narrated by a worker who is
homeless — and dead.
By MOTOKO RICH“When I was a child, I
didn’t belong anywhere,”
Yu Miri, shown in Ueno
Park, said. “So I feel like
that’s what I am writing
about when I write about
homeless people or
people on the edge of
society.”NORIKO HAYASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESHikari Hida contributed reporting.
to life the holiday classic in a multisensory
way. Led by Ms. Seham and Dalia Sakas, the
school’s director of music studies, the
course provides background in the story,
history and cultural context of “The Nut-
cracker” (presented a bit differently for
young children, teens and adults).
Each student also receives a package of
“Nutcracker” artifacts: a pointe shoe; a
candy cane; a long stretch of tulle (from
which tutus are made); a story synopsis
and glossary in large print or Braille; sheet
music with sections of Tchaikovsky’s score;
and, of course, a nutcracker.
Perhaps most important, the class allows
students to imagine the ballet through
movement — to experience aspects of the
work through their own bodies.
“They can’t sit in the audience and see the
snow, but they can bethe snow,” Ms. Seham
said in a phone interview. “For me this class
is about being dance.”
While the course is new territory for the
music school — a “beta tester” for teaching
ballet appreciation, Ms. Sakas said — it also
builds on existing programs. Founded in
1913 (and formerly part of the larger organi-
zation Lighthouse Guild), the school has a
history of illuminating visual art through
music. Since 1997, it has held an annual con-
cert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
pairing pieces from the museum’s collection
with “music that enhances the spirit of the
artwork,” Ms. Sakas said. In recent years,
students have written poetry that informs
the selection of music and art.
The “Nutcracker” course extends this
idea to dance, opening up a fantastical
world that students may know only by
name. “Even though they can’t see, they’re
aware that there is a ‘Mona Lisa,’ they’re
aware that these paintings exist,” Ms. Sakas
said, “so why shouldn’t they be aware of
dance as well?”
Because of the coronavirus pandemic,
the music school moved its classes online, a
shift that has been limiting in some ways
but also “allowed us to dream a little bit”
and try new things, Ms. Sakas said. Before
the pandemic, students from the school met
for weekly in-person classes with Ms. Se-
ham and volunteer alumni from National
Dance Institute, who served as movement
partners, guiding and collaborating with
the students through physical touch. (The
program is one of many facilitated by the
dance institute, which was founded by the
New York City Ballet star Jacques
d’Amboise in 1976 to make dance more
widely accessible to children.)
“When we were able to meet in person,
tactile teaching was a really important ele-
ment,” Ms. Seham said. “Obviously online
we can’t do that, so we’re left with audio de-
scription” — describing the steps in clear,
direct detail — “and finding that we can do
it, it’s just a little bit slower.”
To acquaint students with the traditional
music and story of “The Nutcracker,” Ms.
Sakas and Ms. Seham have been sharing
excerpts from a 1993 video recording of the
standard-bearer: George Balanchine’s 1954
version for New York City Ballet, in which a
young girl, Marie, journeys with the Nut-
cracker Prince to the Kingdom of the Sug-
arplum Fairy (the Land of Sweets).
But Ms. Seham said she also wants stu-
dents to know about more contemporary
takes on the classic — with varied charac-
ters, settings, music and styles of dance —
and to envision their own. She has intro-
duced them, for instance, to Donald Byrd’s
1996 “Harlem Nutcracker,” featuring jazz
arrangements of Tchaikovsky by Duke El-
lington and Billy Strayhorn. Students are
asked to consider: “What would your ‘Nut-
cracker’ be? What would your magical jour-
ney be?” she said. “And how would that en-
compass what’s happening now and who
you are?”
Those questions reflect Ms. Seham’s gen-
eral approach to teaching at the music
school, where she often connects dance
with themes of social justice. Many of her
students, she said, are children of color who
confront multiple forms of discrimination in
their daily lives. “When we talk about sys-
temic racism and lack of access and lack of
inclusion, they’re in the middle of it,” she
said. “And so I want through the arts for
them to be able to express themselves and
show themselves.”
For the “Nutcracker” course, Ms. Seham
has been teaching some basic ballet steps
while also leaving room for personal inter-
pretation. “How you interpret it, how you
feel the rise and fall of it, that’s up to you,”
she told a group of students, ages 12 to 17,
referring to the back-side-side footwork of a
pas de bourrée, a structured preface to
“freestyle snow.” “You can’t really mess up,”
she added.
In the absence of physical touch as a
teaching tool, the items in the “Nutcracker”
package offer a different kind of tactile ex-
perience. Daniel Gillen, 26, a pianist and
longtime student at the music school, said
the texture of the tulle surprised him. Dur-
ing the adult class, he danced with the waft-
ing fabric wrapped around his waist. “I did-
n’t think that it would be so porous,” he saidin a phone interview. “Because all the air
gets through, it almost becomes lighter
than air.”
Opening the package, some students en-
countered a pointe shoe for the first time.
(The shoes were collected by Daniel Ul-
bricht, a New York City Ballet principal, and
are signed by members of the company who
wore them.)
“Honestly, I’d never seen or heard of one,”
Matthew Herrera, 12, said by phone. “It’s
cool to see what real professionals wear.”Matthew, who is visually impaired and
has taken Ms. Seham’s classes for six years,
said that as a musician who studies piano
and voice, improvising is one of his
strengths — and the same goes for dance.
While dancing like snow, he said, he tried to
think “about how it moves in the wind.”
“I feel like everyone, once in a while at
least, should kind of just let themselves go,
especially through art, dance included,” he
said. “It’s fun to do it. It’s a beautiful thing.”CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILY MASON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTop, Gabby Mendonca
during her “Nutcracker”
dance class offered by
the Filomen M.
D’Agostino Greenberg
Music School. Above,
Logan Riman with a
pointe shoe.Being, Not Seeing,
‘The Nutcracker’