This month's IRL book club book is a repeat author. We read (and loved) Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami two years ago and we were happy to return to an author who impressed us before. While Breast and Eggs is about women's position in Japanese society and reproductive rights, Heaven is about friendship and bullying and nihilism. Love me an author who can treat such different subjects.
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| ★★★★☆ |
Our unnamed narrator (unless you want to call him Eyes) is ceaselessly bullied and one day he finds a note under his desk saying "We should be friends". This note could be from his bullies, another attempt to mess with him, or maybe it's from Kojima, another classmate who is bullied non-stop for her dirty clothes and messy appearance.
"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."
There's Meaning to Suffering
Our main character strikes a friendship with his classmate based on mutual suffering and at the core of it, loneliness. Her letters bring him peace and serenity. But would they still be friends if they weren't endlessly tortured by their classmates? Kojima believes that all this suffering means something, that it somehow makes them better than the rest of their classmates, their suffering must have a purpose. But does it?
Heaven is an uncomfortable book to read. It's raw and cold and you cannot escape being a witness to their bullying and suffering unless you close the book, literally. All the time while reading I was hoping for someone else to step up or for our narrator or Kojima to do something other than accepting "their fate". But how many of us do something when we witness others being bullied around us? This book brought back some memories of times I stood by while others were being bullied and I am having a hard time understanding why I acted that way. The bullying was never as harsh as it is in this book, but I still never said anything. So why was I expecting the other kids in this class to intervene?
"Without school, I could get by without seeing anyone or being seen by anyone. It was like being a piece of furniture in a room that nobody uses. I can't express how safe it felt never being seen."
Life Is Meaningless
At the same time as Kojima talks about accepting the suffering and its meaning, our narrator has a talk with one of his bullies and it all turns philosophical. One might say a bit too philosophical for the age of our characters, but I don't think so. Speaking for experience, I was way more likely to turn to philosophical discourses when I was younger than I am now. And what is our bully going to philosophise about if not nihilism and the meaningless of life.
Our narrator is very passive most of the novel, just being here to listen to others express their opinions but never fully knowing which side he prefers or if he even has another opinion. Does suffering make us better than others? Does the world owe us anything? Is life meaningless?
Nihilism is never my go-to philosophical route. We just don't vibe and
it makes me uncomfortable, probably just as uncomfortable as reading this
novel made me.
"For people to actually live by some golden rule, we’d have to be living in a world with no contradictions. But we don’t live in a world like that. No one does. People do what works for them, whatever makes them feel good. But because nobody likes getting stepped on, people start spouting crap about being good to others, being considerate, whatever. Tell me I’m wrong. Everyone does things they don’t want people doing back. Predators eat prey, and school serves no real purpose other than separating the kids who have what it takes from the ones who don’t. That’s the whole point. Everywhere you look, the strong walk all over the weak. Even those fools who think they’ve found the answers by coming up with perfect little sayings about how the world ought to be can’t escape it. Because the real world is everywhere."
A Cold Detached Author
What impressed me the most about Heaven is how the author never tries to influence the reader one way or the other. It never tells you what to think or what to feel. Reading this book really turns into an internal conversation and it forces the reader to think about their personal views. It's like the ending of the film Triangle of Sadness, an ending left intentionally open but in a way that however you interpret it ends us saying something about you as a person. Kawakami does pretty much the same thing, but she does it throughout the novel.
The ending is satisfying, in a way. It's bittersweet, of course, I did not expect anything else from Kawakami, but at the same time I was expecting something else - something I thought the author foreshadowed but then decided against. It was a great read nonetheless and a perfect choice for our book club. Any book that makes us go outside the book and share from our personal experiences is a great book club book!
"In the cold December air, all the leaves, thousands upon thousands of them, flashed against the sky, drenched in gold. Every leaf rang with its own light, and all the light poured into me without end."
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami was first published in 2009 and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
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