Bullied and Shunned, They Found a New Way to See the World

HEAVEN
By Mieko Kawakami
Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Have you allowed yourself to forget, perhaps for the purposes of survival, the intense clarity with which you saw the world at 14? I don’t mean the strength of the emotions you felt, the ones that linger with us as adults in manageable, washed-out shades — lust, love, shame, rage. I mean the way that the arbitrary injustice of the world, and its cruel divisions — rich and poor, weak and strong — made themselves starkly apparent. The Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami has not forgotten. “We often talk about death being absolute,” she told The Guardian last year, “but I can’t help but think that being born is no less final.” Her characters grapple with the most fundamental obscenity: that of being alive at all.

“Heaven,” Kawakami’s second book to appear in English, opens with a note passed inside a pencil case: “We should be friends.” At first, the 14-year-old narrator, whom the other students call Eyes for his lazy eye, believes the note is a prank by the boys who bully him. But the message is from Kojima — nicknamed Hazmat — the unwashed girl the other girls torture. The two pariahs form a stilted, secret alliance.

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. But the rare times the two steal away to meet in person, Kojima delivers long philosophical monologues. What differentiates us from objects? If there is no god, then why is there suffering? “We’ll understand some things while we’re alive, and some after we die,” she declares. “What matters is that all the pain and sadness have meaning.”

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. The narrator’s internal world is all we see when the bullies slip a deflated volleyball over his head and kick him until the floor of the empty gymnasium runs with blood. His tormentors are nearly faceless, their violence a force of nature. It seems like something they have always known: how to beat someone without leaving marks, how to torture without being caught.