Tokyo Ueno Station

The general idea of this book attracted me - a man reflecting on his life after his death. However, the story laboured for me and I struggled to engage with it. I stuck with it until the end but there was nothing memorable about the story for me and although the writing was beautiful I couldn’t recommend it to someone when there are so many other brilliant books out there. Sorry.

The delivery is fast and I'm looking forward to the book. The content of the book is interesting enough to keep me reading as well. However, the biggest problem is that in between every 10 pages, there'll be 2 pages that are glued (?) together, or the pages aren't neatly cut. When I'm trying to flip through pages, I do have to torn the meshed pages apart from each other and the paper is too thin so I broke a few pages during reading the novel.The quality of the book is good, but the paper is NOT.

I received this book as a gift and used the 2020 lockdown as a chance to sit down and read it. Being used to Japanese literature, the style of the book didn't surprise me particularly, but still, for some reason, it took a while for me to click with it. This is surprising as one of the main themes it deals with is death and memorialisation, issues which have been a feature of my own studies of Japan. Perhaps there was still part of me that was expecting there to be a story in a linear structure. Once, however, I accepted the book for what it is, I found it easier to digest and finished it very quickly. I could imagine the Pet Shop Boys providing the soundtrack to this book as much like so many of their songs, it provides a collection of insights and observations.