Excellent depiction of the life (and death) of a homeless man in contemporary Japan

 I feel two ways about Yu Miri's 2014 brief novel, Tokyo Ueno Station (tr Morgan Giles, 2019). On the one hand, Miri - well-known in Japan but just being recognized and lauded in the U.S. - does a great job presenting the life story of the narrator, an older Japanese man who has lived with hardship across the span of his life, mostly living apart from his wife and 2 children as he worked at various manual-labor jobs to keep his family just above the poverty level, faced with sorrow later in life as his son dies unexpectedly and eventually leaves his family and takes up his final years living among the homeless in the large Tokyo Ueno park. She tells his life story in clear, exacting detail and never becomes lachrymose or sentimental; his life, and in particular his life among the homeless, helps us see as few other novels have what it's like trying to survive in such circumstances - faced w/ the bitter elements, random attacks by hooligans, occasional eviction notices from the police (clear the park of all your belongings until a set date/time in the future so as not to disturb the emperor on a visit to the park museums), the cold, the rain and snow, illness, and just the need for warmth and comfort. We see that the homeless are not necessarily suffering w/ addiction or mental illness and not nobody would select this type of life by choice. Interestingly, there's a community of fellowship among the homeless, at least for the most part. Ideally, this novel will help all readers see the life of a homeless man in a new and more sympathetic manner. All that said, why the hell did Miri have to make the narrative so confusing? We figure out quickly - and I'm not giving much away (the NYT story this week on Miri gave away this point in the subhead) by saying that the narrator is a "ghost" who tells his life story from somewhere beyond. OK, fair enough, but why be so ambiguous and confusing about the end, and why the circuitous narrative pathway? Additionally, most American readers will be put off, as was I, by the many Japanese place names, which mean nothing to me but give the novel an exotic veneer - do we need to know the names of all the subway lines?, do we need such detail on the Shinto mourning rites? So in a way, the novel, or at least the translation, could be more friendly to non-Japanese readers just through some simple editorial decisions. But I guess Miri might like the place names for the incantatory effect, much like the prayer litanies that she includes. As a portrait of a homeless man, this novel is excellent, but I wish it had been more straightforward in its narrative development, which at times feels out of control or random.