Heaven by Mieko Kawakami — the bullied boy
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Heaven, the latest novel by the Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami to be translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd, contains some of the most violent and disturbing scenes you’re likely to read this year. In 2020, Kawakami’s bestseller Breasts and Eggs was published to critical acclaim in Bett’s and Boyd’s translation, but Heaven, which appeared in Japanese in 2009, was Kawakami’s first full-length novel.
Its structure is more straightforward than that of Breasts and Eggs, which was split into two sections and used extended passages of dialogue to explore ideas about reproduction and the female body. In Heaven a 14-year-old protagonist provides a linear account of being savagely bullied by his classmates, ostensibly for having a lazy eye (they call him “Eyes”).
At the beginning of the book he finds a note folded inside his pencil case: “We should be friends.” It’s from Kojima, a girl described by the narrator in his characteristic deadpan style: “Short, with kind of dark skin.”
Kojima “never talked at school” and is tormented by other girls. Neither the narrator nor Kojima defend themselves and instead accept their classmates’ attacks with resignation.
The pair visit an art gallery where Kojima shows the narrator “a painting of two lovers eating cake in a room with a red carpet and a table”, which she calls “Heaven”.
While not lovers they find solace in each other’s company; Kojima predicts they will achieve redemption through their suffering: “We do it for everyone who’s weak everywhere, in the name of actual strength. Everything we take, all of the abuse, we do it to rise above.”
Why doesn’t a teacher or parent intervene? The attacks become increasingly sadistic and blatant, yet even when the narrator goes home covered in blood after a game of “human soccer”, his mother fails to realise what’s happening. But Kawakami isn’t aiming for realism.
Instead, Heaven is set in a sinister parallel world, where the darker elements of our own societies are accentuated, perhaps to remind us that, as WH Auden observed in his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”, suffering always takes place “while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”.
In contrast, Kojima’s Christ-like claims can sound grandiose. When the narrator eventually confronts one of the bullies, the other boy says: “Listen, if there’s a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there. This is it.”
It’s left to the reader to decide whether the bully’s indifference to his victim’s pain is a symptom of terrifying emotional numbness or whether it contains wisdom. Kawakami’s novel undermines our moral assumptions and leaves us unsure what to think about the way its characters behave.
Heaven is set in the 1990s and, although Kojima briefly alludes to the idea that the world might end in 1999, it’s not clear why. “My bad,” says a girl after making a mistake, but I’m not sure people said that then. It’s a rare false note in this short but assured novel. By the end, the reader is so dizzily absorbed in its visceral details and philosophical complexity that, when the twist comes, it hits you with a strange and unexpected force.
Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, Picador, RRP£14.99/Europa Editions, RRP$23, 176 pages
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