Possibility of New Narrative for Disaster Victims, Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station: Focusing on the Changed Family Image and the Narrative of the Deceased

Abstract

Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station is a story that unfolds by the narrative of the deceased, and through the life of a man who died himself after suffering from poverty and bad luck, it illuminates the dark side of Japanese society that has continued since the war. Soon after his family dies one after another and the family collapses, the protagonist, who has been going into a living since childhood, lays down the old burdens that have supported his family and becomes a homeless person in Ueno Park. Unlike the father’s image commonly seen in the existing Yu Miri literature, the protagonist of this work can be said to be a devoted head full of family responsibilities and family love. However, contrary to the author’s walk to make efforts to restore disaster-affected areas and to have spoken hope, the dark atmosphere of the work and the desperate ending appear contrastive, which seems contradictory. Conscious of this, I read this work as a text suggesting that suicide cannot be the ultimate solution just because life is difficult, and attempts to derive the message at the era. Optimistic perception is emerging, which has no real basis for the posthumous world that the protagonist, who committed suicide while losing the power of his life had in his lifetime. However, his appearance in the posthumous period was completely different from his beliefs in his lifetime. In the end, this work presents the possibility that the posthumous world is different from what people like the protagonist would think, and seems to be wary of extreme choices that originally block the possibility of a new life. Like this, it can be said that Tokyo Ueno Station is a text which evokes the fiction of religious doctrine, and lays the ground for reconsideration for modern people who are prone to the dangerous temptation of suicide by a momentary impulse.