reviews

Review of HEAVEN

Author: Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

By Stephen O’Connor

Scroll down the headlines nowadays and it is clear the pandemic has amplified the inequitable divisions in the world – the haves and have nots. Perhaps it is not without coincidence then that Mieko Kawakami’s third novel in English, Heaven has been released for a worldwide audience during a pandemic. Having previously been a student of philosophy, Mieko Kawakami in her novels, doesn’t shy away from offering a philosophical sagacity into the lows of an unjust society. Her characters often focus on the marginalized; a lonely, obsessive boy in Ms Ice Sandwich and also some of societies more pervasive issues, such as the working poor and poverty in her second novel to be translated into English, Breasts and Eggs.

Heaven begins benignly enough when the narrator, a middle school boy who we never know the name of, comes across an anonymously written note requesting friendship. However, the writer, Kojima, is a girl in the class who seeks a soul mate to form an alliance of support against the vicious bullying that both the protagonists are enduring. This opening gambit sets the scene as the victims struggle passively, outwardly, at least against some very bleak and intense physical assaults. Both the narrator and Kojima’s adolescence, in which teenagers should be discovering themselves, instead becomes an exhausting trial by fire through the brutality of a group of peers led by the most popular, intelligent boy in school, Ninomiya and the more contemplative, Momose. It seems that the narrator and Kojima are etched in a perpetual state of numbed despair, only countered when they can exchange notes or meet outside of school to convince each other of their inherent specialness, which Kojima grungely attributes to an estranged father, and the narrator’s lazy eye, a “slimy deep sea fish from a hidden world.”

At times because the violence and beatings are in such a conventional and unremarkable setting, it can be jarring for the reader, but its full on ferocity zeros in on the two contradictory binaries presented in the novel-good vs evil. However, Kawakami takes the well-worn trope and invigorates it with meaning, as the narrator and Kojima consider to what extent Heaven will make their suffering at least bearable and at a stretch, valuable. Nevertheless, the literal Heaven in the novel, a painting depicting two lovers in a room, remains unattainable as it was “all the way in the back” of the museum, and the search for meaning comes down to two contradictory dichotomies; Kojima with her almost devout assertion that the suffering they experience has merit, and in opposition, Momoe who posits a godless state of mind, offering a despairing moral nihilism. Thus the novel’s final premise constitutes to what extent the nameless narrator can breech the suffering, raise it up, and brand it as satisfying amongst all the misery. The unflinching style, told from the narrator’s point of view, is a strength of the novel as the tone remains both authentic and the language captivates us with its mixture of both telegrammatic urgency and rich images, making for an engrossing read.

 It has taken far too long for Mieko Kawakami’s stories to be read outside Japan, probably because she challenges the status quo. In these unsettled times, it is commendable she does.