Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
Review of Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd
“Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.”
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami (2021). Published by Europa Editions.
Kawakami Mieko has made a perfect storm in Japan ever since her short story collection, Breast and Eggs, came out in Japan. It wasn’t until 2021, however, did we find a translation of her novel Heaven come out in the English-speaking world. This book originally came out in 2009, but it took over a decade for it to reach my hands. I had found it at my local library on a day that was pretty good book-wise, as they had gotten in a bunch of books in translation.
My area isn’t exactly known for its culture, so I was pleasantly surprised to find so many good books in the new section at once. After plowing through The Woman in the Purple Skirt, I got to Heaven and plowed through it pretty quickly too. This isn’t that long of a book, but oh man do you get absorbed into this story. It’s a really painful story which is why I think I was so sucked into it, and because as someone who was once bullied myself, I can spiritually relate to it (although not to the extreme that is depicted in this book).
I found this book to be a more realistic version of another Japanese book I read recently, Lonely Castle in the Mirror. Heaven is about a boy being heavily and brutally bullied at school and finding solace with another girl in his class who is the other victim of the bullies. I want to go into more detail, but this is only the intro, so let’s start the review!
Content
This book is told in first person by a fourteen-year-old boy, one who has vision problems because he has a lazy eye. But having this condition also has led to another big problem in his life: he is being intensely bullied by his classmates, who threaten him not to tell anyone. Alone and in misery, our protagonist begins to think this is normal. In one particularly horrible scene, his classmate cuts open a volleyball, shoves it onto our narrator’s head, and commences human soccer. Then their classmates begin kicking him brutally, leaving him profusely bleeding and in desperate need to go to the doctor. Personally, at that moment I would’ve given up, but he continues onward. He lies and says it was a bike accident, then continues to go to school, meeting our secondary main character: Kojima.
Kojima is the only other student in the class also being bullied as hard and as much as he is. She is called ugly and told she smells like fish, has things thrown at her. She is told she is unworthy because she is poor and looks unkempt, which is similar to our main character—he is bullied because of his appearance. And one day, she decides to send a note to the narrator, offering friendship and the chance to meet up. These two find solace in one another, but as the bullying begins to get worse and worse, there’s only so much that these two can handle in their lives.
Some people might find the fact that this is a straightforward book narrated by a fourteen-year-old boy unappealing. It’s very straightforward and dwells on the agony that is his life, making it dense material to get through, and we do enter the territory of him dwelling on suicide and ways to kill himself. That’s not something every reader can handle, and there are no trigger warnings in the real world, so I’m just saying this upfront in the review. If you’ve also gone through intense bullying, this is not the book for you because we get really descriptive with some painful events. We also get something very fourteen-year-old boy like too: a scene of masturbation, one where he then starts to think of his new friend Kojima.
One of the biggest questions that the novel brings up is who gets the power to bully another and why do they choose to willingly inflict misery on other humans. We see our protagonist confront one of his bullies at one point and ask him Kojima and he were the victims of their abuse. And the answer the kid gives is honestly pretty disturbing, along the lines of that there is no rhyme and reason to this.
However, the structure itself to the book is very predictable, something that seems public-friendly and something I’ve 100% seen before. Boy meets girl, they find refuge in each other, then there’s a big showdown. There’s nothing new and innovative about this form, and I didn’t love this book because it was particularly painful to read and it felt like a rehash of things I’ve seen before.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an okay book; it’s well-written and it tells the story of trauma and circumstances that are heartbreaking. It forces you to think about the times you were a bystander in something and didn’t do anything to help fix the situation. It’s very philosophical and shows about how superficial appearances are deceiving—Kojima herself isn’t even poor yet she’s bullied for it. Our main character chooses to fix his lazy eye, saying that the world is new after doing the procedure, but I doubt it changed anything either. Also I don’t think another fourteen-year-old bully would respond like a wise old philosopher, that felt a tad unrealistic too. If you have some spare time and can stomach it, then give the book a shot.
