Kazu
This novel is a story about a man named Kazu Mori, told by the ghost of Kazu which focuses exclusively on Kazu’s perception and delves deeply into his consciousness and memory. Or, put another way, it is a story in which Kazu is not just the main character and protagonist and narrator, but really the only character of significance. Everything that happens, including his interactions with other marginal characters, is filtered through his experiences.
That experience focuses on the fact that he arrived in Tokyo to help reconstruct the city for its preparation to re-enter the world stage following its to enter World War II in partnership with the fascist regimes in Europe. The focal point of that re-entry is the 1964 Olympics. The opportunity to take part in this transformative event in the country’s history is offset by the untimely early deaths of his son, Koichi, and his wife, Setsuko. These tragedies send Kazu spiraling downward into grief and misery. The tragedy is amplified by the fact that despite being married for decades, Kazu’s life as an itinerant worker allowed them to actually spend precious few of those days living together.
Kazu’s tragic trajectory is placed in juxtaposition—only by himself, of course—with the opposite trajectory of the Japanese royal family as a result of he and Emperor Akihito sharing the same birth year and the coincidence of his son and the emperor’s son, Naruhito, having both been on the exact same day. While the members of the royal family enjoy the privilege of lineage and wealth, Kazu’s story moves toward homelessness, loneliness, isolation, and social invisibility.
Shige
Shige is one of the few characters of significance who is not a relative of Kazu and who exists in what passes for the “present” rather than as a distant memory recollected in a flashback. Shige’s significance derives from the fact he is another of the forgotten and invisible homeless of Japanese elderly society. He also earns his distinction as important despite being a relatively minor character due to his direct impact on Kazu’s narrative.
Kazu considers Shige an intellectual worthy of respect and admiration. This status derives from Shige’s knowledge of history which he conveys through long passages filled with detail, statistics, and vivid imagery. Shige becomes the purveyor of background information about Tokyo that serves to fill in gaps and add contextual relevance to readers with Kazu’s narration acting as the conduit of that information highway.
Alas, Shige is also a character worthy of note because of the circumstances of his death. In fact, the very first mention of Shige is that he has recently died. The awareness of his passing adds to the overall sense of tragedy permeating the story: “They found him gone cold in his tent.” In addition to being an intellectual, Shige is also presented as sensitive and empathetic with his tender care for a stray cat he names Emile and pays for neutering with money earned from collecting and selling cans.
