HEAVEN — (Book Review)
Mieko Kawakami
Thoughts flitted through my consciousness during my journey with this book, many layers of questions within myself, an awe of fighting conscience to stand by whom. It is a philosophical narrative about the lives of students trapped in the system of immaturity, lost, blind, and afraid. In this scary world system, everyone chooses their style to survive and that depends on how the person values their life and most importantly the lives of others. This book is about the confused mind of a young schoolboy and a stubborn girl with strength of purpose. When I decided to read this book after countless recommendations, I knew the context would be profound and harrowing, but the story is cast in a formless tone and is in our hands to interpret, agree, or disagree with in our way.
The story begins with a secret letter from a classmate Kojima to Eyes. Eyes were his name at school because he had a lazy eye, with the pupil shifted to one side, which meant he was the weakest in the class. Weakness doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the strength to endure anything, but it is simply that some people automatically think they are somehow superior because of their normal eyes or nondescript identity. Kojima and Eyes were victims of bullying, bullying is a term for schoolboy pranks, here it’s more like criminals ganging up on a helpless person. It is unsettling to read a life that is out of control, like a machine living under the protection of a system that is trimmed to perfection and functions according to the master’s will without any opinion. Such a life is not fiction, it is the reality of the world we live in, but we choose to see only what we want to see.
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Only a person who has suffered the intensity can indeed understand another person who has experienced the same. Here, Kojima and Eyes were both thrown into the darkness of bullying, sharing the burden of ugliness placed upon them. With nowhere to escape, and nowhere to hide, they move in and out of spaces, choosing to live this way because there is no other way. These letters never talk about bullying, it’s all about the imperfect fantasy of a life they could have had, and the times they shared, their first date, their first outing in the summer, all of it was ingredients to make the fantasy come true. Every day they slipped through the endless bullying of classmates and continued to write letters, like a quirky instinct they treasured the words from their hearts and added letters to write sentences in the void.
The burgeoning emotions died down as Momose opened up about his views. It’s always a trend to hear the inner voice of the person getting bullied, but I have never heard a bully’s interpretation of the scene he created. When Eyes confronted Momose in the hospital, we waited for Eyes to punch Momose in the face when the story says, “It is not how you wanted it to be. I was desperate enough to understand what Momose was saying, just like Eyes, I was at a loss for words, it was hard to accept that a person you hated halfway through the book made sense, that what he was saying was true. With each sentence he hurled at Eyes, it became harder to cultivate the rest. Momose said, “There is no beautiful world where everyone thinks the same way and they all understand each other perfectly. That doesn’t exist. You think it is, but it’s not real”.” There’s nothing you can do but protect yourself.
When life gives more than we have decided it somehow manages to control us and we fall into the trap and move with the flow, everyone has a reason to be the way they are, that reason could be anything unrelated to the other person, just like Kojima’s dirty dress, dirty smell, and uncouth demeanor, she has a reason to be that way, to keep her that way, but no one can understand the logic just because their situations are very different, No one in the world is a good person there is no way humanity will save the world, we are all at the center of our world and the creator of our own choices, mostly for self-gratification, when given the choice 90% of the chances are taken for your happiness instead of making others happy, and making others happy somehow makes you happy, we do things to relax in the sober world, that’s just the way it is. So please don’t think you are beholden to the happiness of others, because we are not, we are inveterate egoists looking to our happy time in the world.
Heaven is not a happy story, it is not something you read to relax, it is a story that is deeply rooted in the earth and its roots keep spreading with time, I think you should read it twice, first to understand the story and then to understand the meaning, the novel raises many unanswered questions about humanity and perception, and sometimes helplessness, please don’t embed in your brain that these things only occur in fiction, but the fact it’s not, it’s much darker than we might expect, just because you haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean others haven’t.
Just like Kojima, when she was naked on the ground and they made fun of her suffering, she transformed into a different person, and she was able to scare her bullies with what they wanted by giving them what they wanted. So, the basic idea here is, that if you want to compete against the world of running, you have to understand the taste of self, the taste of solitude. And the courage to move forward in your way. You do not have to associate courage with standing up for yourself, here as in the story, it’s also a form of courage to show your weakness. As in the book: “We see the world differently, so you have to be strong. You have to overpower people so that they can’t come at you with their thoughts, rules or values”.
