Risk Culture, Spectres of Multinational Destruction, and Processes of Emergency in Tokyo Ueno Station

Abstract

This article explores the 2020 translation of Yu Miri’s 2014 Japanese-language novel Tokyo Ueno Station (translated into English by Morgan Giles) as an example of crisis literature that operates on the level of an ethico-aesthetic emergency text in both fast- and slow-time registers to represent the post-global experience of ongoing catastrophe. I examine the crisis represented by Tokyo Ueno Station not as an abrupt disjunction but rather as processual ruination. Yu’s novel indicates the irresolvability of the twenty-first century both in and as crisis. I aim to understand the scalar shifting between the local, the national, and the new cartography of belonging and exclusion created by the multinational corporation. In doing so, I suggest that Yu’s peri-post-crisis, post-Fukushima Japan can be read as part of the processual wreckage of the triple disasters of imperialist rule, American influence, and neoliberal capitalist social disintegration. The concatenations of ghost, nation, globe, and capital mark Tokyo Ueno Station as a posttraumatic crisis text – a fragmented emergency-in-process whereby the brief, climactic devastation of 3/11 illustrates that misery on a personal and societal level is not a single moment of cataclysm but is rather an interweaving of risk, failure, and neoliberal cruelty.