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"A Man with No Talents"

Oyama Shiro is certainly not as he describes himself, "A Man with No Talents."

“Although Oyama’s dim view of himself and others recalls the rankings of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, his tone is resigned, even serene. This meditative memoir won a literary prize in Japan; since then, Oyama reports in an epilogue, he has left San’ya to live on the streets, scraping by with the award money from his book and looking forward to the ‘thrill’ of one day scavenging for food.”—The New Yorker

“A Man with No Talents is at once a memoir, a piece of social anthropology, a history of an an ode to San’ya. . . . It gives a voice to a silent population of Tokyo—the homeless, the dispossessed and social outcast, those bearing the shame of unemployment and those for whom San’ya, more than a place, a disappearing way of a life, is a ‘social outlet’ and a choice. . . . [Its author] is a complex character and, like the book, full of contradictions; a cuttingly keen obsevrer, he is at times opaque to himself, full of prejudices and odd philosophies, deeply flawed and almost misanthropic.”—Times Literary Supplement