Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

As Tony, the host of ‘January in Japan’ says in his review of this superb novella, ‘despite its title, this is a book where the main characters are going through hell…’

Heaven is the third novel of Kawakami’s to be translated into English, after Ms Ice Sandwich and Breasts & Eggs which are both in my TBR. I was drawn to this one first though, which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize, but also because I’d managed to get a signed copy when it was first published (below).

At Secondary / High School there is nothing worse you can do than stand out, whether deliberately or not. This is the case for our fourteen-year-old protagonist, who is never named. He has a lazy eye which has put a target on his back for the class bullies, who are ruthless in their battering and humiliations – always careful to not let their kicks and punches leave a mark. They call him “Eyes”.

As the novel begins, he finds a note in his pencil case, ‘”We should be friends.” it says. More notes come including one asking him for a meeting. Could this be bully-in-chief Ninomiya’s latest plan to humiliate him? Suspicious, yet intrigued, he goes to the park as requested and to his surprise he finds Kojima there. Kojima is similarly bullied by the girls, for her unwashed smell and old clothes. The pair become friends in adversity, and start to write to each other, as they can’t afford to be seen together.

The bullies don’t stop, but Kojima remains resolute in holding out against them, our narrator is less certain, but when the summer holidays come, the two friends arrange to go on a day trip together. Kojima wants to take him to see “Heaven”; they take the train, and Kojima is talking excitedly.

When she got excited her voice got louder. I kind of liked it, but when she realized she was almost yelling, she got self-conscious and dropped into a whisper. Before long she was yelling agin, and when I saw her realize it, we both laughed.
“Happamine.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s, like, dopamine that comes out when you’re really happy.”
“Oh yeah?”
“And when you’re really hurting,” she explained, “that’s called hurtamine.”
“What about when you’re lonely?” I asked.
“Lonelamine!” she laughed.

It’s nice to be able to give a quote where the pair are happy in each other’s company, and not in pain. They reach an art gallery, for “Heaven” is a painting she’s seen in a book of a pair of lovers eating cake; they’ve found their safe space. But the pair never get to see the actual painting, when Kojima accidentally upsets the narrator by commenting on the eyes in a painting seeming to follow you, and they leave the gallery before reaching “Heaven”.

Summer over, a new term starts and the bullying never lets up for either of them, although Kojima tends to confront it more than he does. He suffers a particularly bad beating in which his nose is badly bruised and bloodied, but not broken – a sympathetic young doctor is kind to him, and on his return visit to have his nose checked, suggests he considers eye surgery as strabismus can be helped by it and eye exercises – food for thought for our narrator. It is on this second visit to hospital that he also spots one of his persecutors there, Momose, who always lets Ninomiya lead, and in a moment of strength confronts him asking why they do what they do to him? This is a pivotal scene and Momose’s responses shock him to his core. There will be more shocks yet to come, and we do wonder if any kind of a happy ending will be possible – I can’t say of course.

Kawakami’s portrait of school bullying is very realistic, graphic and brutal, yet never gratuitous. Her characterisation is spot-on – her two young leads are phenomenal in their range of emotions from happamine to hurtamine. But this strength carries through into the secondary characters too, in Ninomiya and Momose’s behaviour for instance, although the girls who persecute Kojima don’t feature strongly. The pair’s parents are also important characters, especially the boy’s stepmother, who is kind and empathetic to him. Written with economy, Kawakami builds a big picture into just 167 thought-provoking and unsettling pages which are not all doom and gloom, the concepts of “Heaven” and “happamine” representing safe spaces and joi de vivre are also sensitively portrayed, never getting sentimental. Highly recommended indeed – and she has a new book out in March, Sisters in Yellow, I can’t wait!

Source: Own copy. Picador flapped paperback, 2022, 167 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link