Kawakami's novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormenters.
Have you allowed yourself to forget, perhaps for the purposes of survival, the intense clarity with which you saw the world at 14? ... The Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami has not forgotten ... Reading the notes they pass to each other evokes the same hot flush of shame as stumbling upon one’s own letters from that age ... Impeccably translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, the book is full of masterly set pieces of violence, scenes of senseless bullying so lucid you can almost feel the pain yourself. To call these moments cinematic is perhaps to do them an injustice ... But the dissonances of the novel align into perfect vision for the breathtaking ending, which is an argument in favor of meaning, of beauty, of life. It is rare for a writer as complex as Kawakami to be so unafraid of closure, to be as capable of satisfying, profound resolution.
Heaven is a raw, painful, and tender portrait of adolescent misery, reminiscent of both Elena Ferrante's fiction and Bo Burnham's 2018 film Eighth Grade. I cannot, in good conscience, endorse it without a warning: This book is very likely to make you cry ... If Kawakami were a more conventional or sentimental writer, Kojima would be the narrator's first love. Instead, she occupies a blurrier space in his life: Their friendship is intermittent and baffling, rooted less in their personal connection than in Kojima's brittle teenage idealism ... This trajectory is unusual: How many novels about bullying, or about adolescents, end with liberation via nihilism? In Heaven, though, the narrator's embrace of meaninglessness seems, much like his friendship with Kojima, to be a necessary but impermanent developmental stage.
In an age of voice-driven fiction, the phrase 'novel of ideas' has an unavoidably dusty ring. It summons the drowsy cadence of the philosopher, the tedious rehearsal of concepts on loan from antiquated sources ... Yet Kawakami is interested neither in demonstrating what makes people good nor in delighting in their antisocial perversities. Rather, her project is, like Nietzsche’s, a genealogical one ... Kawakami never evangelizes, never wags a finger. She simply sets first-person narrations of suffering alongside stumbling dialogues, attempts to make that suffering intelligible to others ... Heaven also models a rigorous and elegant process of inquiry that can transcend its pared-down fictional world. It agitates against the enduring idea that the best novels concern themselves with the singular minds and manners of people, offering no resources for the political and moral demands of 'real life.'
