![]() ![]() He recounts his life story as a ghost haunting a park frequented by the unhoused in Tokyo. But unlike the Emperor, Kazu is a supremely unlucky man, or was, I should say, because he is no longer alive. It tells the life story of a Japanese man born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor. While I was traveling this past weekend, when not watching back-to-back episodes of Better Things on the plane, I read Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, a tiny slip of a book that won the National Book Award for translated literature in 2020 (and is, incidentally, only 180 pages long). ![]() I liked it, though I’m not sure I’d be able to recommend it. ![]() Milkman is dense and allegorical, mordantly funny and terribly bleak. But I kept thinking of an epiphany I had in college whilst reading Ulysses (on Spring Break by a pool, no less): the only way to get through it is to stop trying to understand what you’re reading and to just keep your eyes moving over the words so that you continue into the book, letting yourself be drawn deeper and deeper into the story without really even noticing it. I completely understand why a lot of people had a hard time with it. Milkman by Anna Burns was weird and gripping, the kind of reading experience that takes a while to get used to. ![]()
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