A nighttime slow train, an untold memory - Ueno, December 1974

A nighttime slow train, an untold memory - Ueno, December 1974
In the winter of December 1974, a night train departed from Ueno Station. In the cold, the reporter met a middle-aged man who happened to be sitting next to him on the train. The man stares blankly out the icy window and suddenly begins to talk. He tells the story of his life, which has been in a series of vicissitudes since the end of the war. He has moved to Tokyo, returned home, moved from one job to another, and had differences with his family. His words, spoken in a quiet tone, are a record of the life of a person with no name, a life that will never be written in newspapers or history books.
The train headed toward the northeast. The train is not crowded, but the air in the car is as dim as a blanket. In a corner of this country that has gone through postwar reconstruction and reached a period of rapid economic growth, people who seem to have been left behind sometimes surrender themselves to drinking as they travel along the railway tracks. The narrative has little intonation, but it has a truthfulness all its own, and the reporter continues to listen in silence.
That night, the train was simply running into the past. As if overlapping with the darkness outside, the man's memories spread from within. Fragments of his life that have never been told are burned into the reporter's heart, riding on the vibrations of the steel. The train, a place of transportation, became a stage where the past and the present, strangers to each other, intersected.
At that moment, the life of a man who has been living in the cracks of society emerged as a single landscape.