I'm not entirely sure that I get this utterly depressing piece of Japanese literature. The blurb tells me that the narrator is dead, but the blurring of lines throughout the book between the dead and the homeless makes me wonder if that assertion is just a metaphor. The ending, too, is ambiguous: I suppose the final tragedy of Kazu's existence is the end of his time as a ghost, but it could also be read as a homeless man committing suicide, which is how I tended to read it. 

I tend to like ambiguity in my reading, but here that ambiguity is combined with pretty much endless misery and sidetracks that pulled my attention away from Kazu himself - the list of roses, for example. I'm sure that if I were cleverer I could mine some meaning from it, but I'm not and I didn't.