TOKYO UENO STATION
By Yu Miri
Translated by Morgan Giles
192 pp. Riverhead. $25.
Yu’s glorious modernist novel is narrated by a voice from the dead — Kazu, a construction worker from Fukushima, who spends his last years in a camp of homeless people in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. After his death, Kazu’s ghost is doomed to haunt the landmarks nearby: the zoo, the subway station, the museum, the memorial statues.
Yu weaves her novel out of overheard conversations, radio and train announcements, intermittent memories of a life spent mostly away from family, glimpses of the park’s history. Giles’s translation is supple throughout. Kazu’s painstaking attention to those in the camp — their appearances, their hopes and disappointments — is perhaps a way to atone for the regret he feels for never being there for his wife and children while alive.
“I did not live with intent,” Kazu says, “I only lived.” Death was supposed to be a reunion of sorts for Kazu, a chance to meet up again with those who had disappeared from his life. Instead, he finds himself still stuck in the same place, “now ceaselessly thinking, ceaselessly feeling.”
In a spectacular scene toward the end of the novel, Kazu sees the Japanese emperor Akihito passing by in a motorcade and finds himself tongue-tied. The two men, though born in the same year, couldn’t be further apart; Kazu ends up silently marveling at “a life that had never known struggle, envy or aimlessness, one that had lived the same 73 years as I had.”
THE FALLEN
By Carlos Manuel Álvarez
Translated by Frank Wynne
143 pp. Graywolf. Paper, $16.
“The Fallen” paints a drab picture of a family in Cuba. Armando, a Castro loyalist, has struggled to keep up all his life with the wiles of corrupt government officials. His wife, once a high school teacher, is now homebound, prone to regular epileptic seizures. Their daughter, María, works in a state-owned hotel where Armando has been appointed as manager. María has a younger brother, Diego, who is away finishing his mandatory military service.
The plot unfolds in brief bursts narrated by each family member. Armando fires an employee who has been siphoning off gas and stealing hotel supplies with María. Diego is disenchanted by the austerity of his childhood years, during the economic crisis of Cuba’s so-called Special Period: “I never had a birthday party. I never had a Nintendo.” At 23, María is the family’s breadwinner. Back at home, their mother is a target of abusive anonymous calls.
Álvarez plausibly conveys the younger generation’s tragedy: their narrowing array of choices in a failed state, their frustration with their parents’ idealism. But Armando and his wife seldom leap off the page as characters; their motives remain opaque, tendentious. The story doesn’t quite cohere, and the episodic form leaves multiple questions unanswered. Is the mother imagining things or not? Why does Armando end up in a police station? Wynne’s translation is often awkward. The parents’ soliloquies, in particular, frequently lapse into truisms. You almost end up believing that all unhappy families are alike.
MINOR DETAIL
By Adania Shibli
Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
105 pp. New Directions. Paper, $15.95.
In 1949, a Palestinian girl is raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers near the border with Egypt. Years later, sometime in the present century, a woman from Ramallah crosses the border into Israel in a rented car.
What links these two stories? Borders, of course, but also some weird echoes. The woman from Ramallah, it turns out, has read about the 1949 episode and is haunted by the coincidence that the crime was committed exactly 25 years to the day before she was born. She sneaks into Israel to find out more, for there may be “nothing more important than this little detail, if one wants to arrive at the complete truth.”
Even though we witness the rape and murder from the point of view of an Israeli commander, it is possible to read the first story, in Jaquette’s careful translation from the Arabic, as the Ramallah woman’s reconstructed version of the crime. Important details from the 1949 account — the smell of gasoline, the “distant howling” of dogs — resurface in the present-day journey, suggesting that she has filtered the trauma of the past through her own ordeal.
The woman from Ramallah squares up against the perils of telling just one side of a story. She visits Israeli archives and museums to learn more about the incident, to little avail. Driving around the countryside, she notices that all the billboards and signs are in Hebrew and that entire Palestinian villages have disappeared. Shibli delicately suggests that the “complete truth” of the crime might never be found out, that perhaps the details in the two stories mirror each other because the past isn’t even past.
TROPIC OF VIOLENCE
By Nathacha Appanah
Translated by Geoffrey Strachan
152 pp. Graywolf. Paper, $16.
Moïse is a boy in Mayotte, a French department consisting of two islands off the coast of southeastern Africa. He is orphaned suddenly when his adoptive white single mother collapses one morning after breakfast. His tragedy could serve as an allegory for Mayotte — an impoverished place neglected by France, though a better option nonetheless for huge numbers of desperate migrants arriving from the neighboring Comoro Islands. Minutes after he finds his mother dead in the kitchen, Moïse runs away from home.
From that point, the novel ceases to persuade: Appanah heaps every imaginable horror on the child. Moïse ends up in a gang of teenagers who rob houses and dabble in bestiality. He is tortured and raped, his dog is killed, he becomes “Scarface Mo” in a neighborhood of migrants, he shoots someone dead.
Voices speak cloyingly from beyond the grave, and their confessions sound especially derivative in Strachan’s translation. The novel abounds in sentences like “This island has made me into a killer” or “You always thought you were different from the rest of us” — flourishes that never get off the ground.
You can’t help feeling that the story never needed the scaffolding of crime or gore, that Moïse’s predicament spoke volumes anyway. His silence contains an intensity that all the violence and mayhem fail to convey. In a vulnerable moment, Moïse wonders why his birth mother didn’t abandon him years ago inside the hollow trunk of a baobab tree: “I’d have become a little bit of that tree, invincible, admirable. It’s a glorious life being a baobab tree on a beach.”
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