Heaven by Mieko Kawakami is set in a Japanese middle school about a fourteen-year-old boy whose classmates torment him day after day because of his lazy eye. He has company in this misery, Kojima, a girl in his class who gets the same treatment, mostly because she shows up looking dirty and unkempt. One day, little secret letters from Kojima start turning up for him. He writes back, and they build a friendship that becomes a lifeline for both of them.

The main plot of the book is how differently these two kids cope. Our narrator tends to give in completely. He goes along with whatever the bullies throw at him, even when it hurts him badly, and it’s tough to watch. On the other hand, Kojima endures the abuse too, though her silence. She believes their suffering means something. In her eyes, putting up with the cruelty is a form of true strength, and she sees the two of them as the ones who might eventually teach their tormentors a lesson. She becomes a sort of patron saint of endurance, which is fascinating and a little unsettling at once.

Mieko Kawakami shows bullying from various perspectives: the kids who dish it out, the kids who take it, and the damage it leaves behind. She also seems curious about why do some people believe suffering (and life itself) has meaning, while others feel nothing at all?

I really enjoyed the first half. Kawakami has a real gift for building characters and a story that keep you curious. I kept wondering what would happen next, what each new character would bring to the story, and how they would affect our two main characters. Those secret notes are such a sweet touch, and they bring a warmth to the early chapters that balances out all the ugliness around them.

Then, the story takes a sharp turn in the middle into heavy philosophy. Usually, that’s my favorite thing to find in a novel. Here, though, the way Kawakami slips it into the dialogue and plot felt forced, and that’s when my attention started to drift.

The thing that bothered me most was the way these characters talk. Bullies and bullied alike launch into long philosophical debates that sound like they came straight out of a formal seminar. This is not the way most kids talk in everyday life, even in a tense moment between a bully and their target. It all felt too artificial, and it made the world of the story harder to believe.

Heaven is a tough read with graphic bullying and leans into philosophical questions at once. So be prepared prior reading this book, and maybe have something lighter waiting on your shelf for afterward.

My Favorite Bits

• But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.

• Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.

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Author: Mieko Kawakami
Publication date: 2 September 2009
Number of pages: 192 pages

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