Nothing twists my heart like recalling the alienation I felt in childhood. That was a time of blistering self-awareness made all the more painful by children around me who gleefully pointed out my apparent “flaws” and punished me for them. In retrospect we like to say it's our differences which make us unique. We like to assert how the antagonism we endured has made us stronger. These are empowering notions, but what truth does this rationality hold when we still experience the visceral sting of emotional wounds from bullying?
Mieko Kawakami's novel “Heaven” meditates on the real meaning of these trials of childhood. It contemplates who really holds the power in a dynamic where the few who are weak are preyed upon by the dominant majority. It questions what lessons are learned and what truth is revealed by these conflicts. We follow the perspective of a fourteen-year-old boy cruelly nicknamed Eyes by the boys at his school because he has a lazy eye. They relentlessly bully him for this. As their savagery escalates he befriends his classmate Kojima, a female classmate who refuses to practice standard hygiene for a special reason and gets cruelly persecuted by the other schoolgirls.
There's a beautiful tenderness to this story as these two find friendship amidst their alienation and suffering. They pass each other notes and have awkward meetings to discuss things which are alternately banal and meaningful. This feels very true to the experience of adolescence. Equally, it's poignant how the narrator finds solace and relief in small things like putting his hands in the cool space of his desk. It's also powerfully described how his unruly emotions often physically control him. Kawakami also portrays the suffering and after-effects of bullying so sharply where the narrator finds himself driven to the point where “I started crying all night long... I couldn't stop the tears. I asked myself if I was sad, but I had lost touch with what sadness was supposed to be.” These experiences are vividly rendered and made me really reconnect with similar feelings from my own childhood.
The story contains a deep thoughtfulness as the narrator and Kojima formulate competing perspectives when the bullying they experience intensifies and persists. They have very different feelings about the agency they possess. Where the narrator sees himself as a helpless victim, Kojima asserts “I bet we could make them stop. But we're not just playing by their rules. This is our will. We let them do this. It's almost like we chose this.” Her reasoning verges on making her a martyr: “Everything we take, all of the abuse, we do it to rise above.” Meanwhile the narrator does his best to simply endure and survive. It's a complicated reckoning which leads to some scenes which are almost surreal in tone. There's also an odd lengthy exchange with Mamose, one of the bullies who questions how we commonly perceive the state of the world: “Listen, if there's a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it.” The conclusions these different adolescents come to make the reader reevaluate the meaning of these youthful conflicts and how we can get past them. Reading this emotional novel is an unsettling and rewarding experience.
