Kueki Ressha

Kueki Ressha (The Drudgery Train) follows Kanta, a nineteen-year-old with no friends and no girlfriend who scrapes a living as a casual dock labourer, consoling himself with a cup of sake at the end of the day. Set at the end of the Shōwa era, it portrays the loneliness, poverty and labour of a young man’s life, and the question of how long such an existence can go on. The Japanese book also includes a second story.