Book review #1: Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
The review may contain spoilers ahead.
I came across Heaven by Mieko Kawakami almost by accident while browsing the Audible catalogue one day. I hadn’t read any of her work before, but a quick search and the summary caught my attention, partly because bullying is a subject I have encountered often in Korean and Japanese popular media. I was curious to see how the treatment of it would be in literature specifically. I’m glad to have found the book because I ended up connecting with it more deeply than I had expected. I think some books reveal their central themes within the span of a couple of chapters, but Heaven wasn’t one of them. Instead, it unfolded through constant tensions between competing ideas, often leaving me questioning the conclusions and my own interpretations. I’ll try to summarise the book below, hoping to document my thoughts and introspections.
Instead of starting this review with the first chapter, I want to begin with a song by the same name, “Heaven” by Talking Heads, which came to mind while listening to Chapter 5. One particular line
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
stayed with me because I find it very relatable. The song presents heaven not as some grand, transcendent Eden, but as a painfully ordinary and repetitive place. It is a place without growth, surprise, or consequence, but as a result, it is also a place without suffering. This image of permanence can be either deeply comforting or unsettling, depending on how we choose to look at it, but it certainly stands in contrast to our world, where causes have effects, actions have consequences, and suffering is an inescapable part of existence. This led me to think that perhaps the intangible heaven we aspire for does not exist at all and perhaps we are simultaneously living in our heaven and hell, and this existence is the only reality we will ever have.
Kawakami herself writes something similar,
Listen, if there’s a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there. This is it.
However grim it may sound, it is also extremely grounding. There is no promise of another world in which everything will eventually make sense. There is only this present one. The characters in Heaven have no choice but to live within that reality, as they attempt to understand it. I think this makes the book such a compelling read. In this world, there is little that changes, and things are caught in an endless cycle. School begins, pain and humiliation repeat, school ends, and the next day begins again. The same people occupy the same hierarchy and the same power dynamic. There are events, but no real progress, and no guarantee that the suffering will lead to anything better. The characters are left with the world as it is and the difficult task of making sense of it. This is where Heaven becomes an exploration of what happens to our ideas of morality when suffering becomes ordinary, whether suffering has any inherent meaning, and whether enduring suffering is virtuous.
The narrator of the book is a fourteen-year old boy whom his classmates call “Eyes” and relentlessly bully. The dehumanising aspect of it is visible in just the nickname, which reduces a complete person to a single physical feature. The bullying is led by Ninomiya, who, while socially and academically successful, subjects the narrator to the daily routine of humiliation and cruelty. This has become an ordinary part of the narrator’s life and an inseparable component of the school experience for him. The cycle of violence has become so routine for him that the anticipation of it is itself a part of the violence. Then there is his classmate Kojima, who in a similar vein is mocked and treated as “dirty” by her classmates. She deliberately lets her appearance separate her from her peers rather than trying to blend in.
The novel begins when she and the narrator start passing notes to each other in secret. This leads to a miraculous friendship, perhaps not unexpected, as neither of them has to explain to the other the basic experience of being treated like an “outsider”. This shared yet harrowing experience gives them something to mutually bond over. This friendship is also perhaps the first appearance of something resembling the heaven we aspire to in the novel. It’s simply a place where we are treated as complete persons, we are understood, and we can bond over shared experiences. Together, they build a small private world within the larger hostile one. They exchange notes, arrange secret meetings, and eventually visit a museum together to see a painting that Kojima considers significant. Within this world, the narrator is no longer simply “Eyes”, and Kojima is no longer simply the “dirty” girl everyone avoids. They can exist outside the identities imposed upon them.
This friendship also gives them a place from which they can begin to understand their suffering differently, as Kojima gradually builds a philosophy around it. She comes to believe that weakness has meaning and that their position as outsiders is a kind of moral vocation. If the world humiliates them, then there is value in enduring it without becoming like those who hurt them. Her suffering becomes part of her identity, and the marks of her mistreatment become almost sacred. There is something understandable and even comforting in this idea because it gives her control over the meaning of something she cannot control in reality. But it also creates a danger. If suffering becomes the foundation of her identity, then escaping or resisting it could mean losing the very thing that gives it meaning.
This is where Nietzsche comes to mind. In his discussion of slave morality, Nietzsche describes how people who lack the power to act in the world can reinterpret their powerlessness as a form of moral superiority. The strong become cruel, while the weak become virtuous, patient, and morally superior
The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of resentment becoming creative and giving birth to values—a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge.
He connects this transformation to ressentiment, where an inability to act outwardly against one’s circumstances turns inward and becomes a system of values through which those circumstances are reinterpreted. However, Kawakami does not allow us to accept this philosophy comfortably. Kojima’s interpretation of suffering gives her dignity and something to hold onto, but it can also become a trap. If suffering gives us meaning, then resisting it begins to feel like giving up that meaning. The novel therefore asks whether the need to make suffering meaningful can itself become a way of accepting injustice, rather than a reason to fight the conditions that cause it. The narrator is therefore caught between two very different ways of understanding his own suffering. He is drawn to Kojima’s interpretation, but at the same time he cannot completely accept the core idea that suffering is inherently valuable.
Then there is Momose, one of Ninomiya’s followers, who actively participates in the bullying of the narrator. His presence makes the novel’s philosophical conflict more apparent because he approaches the question of suffering without any need to find meaning in it. He is intelligent, composed, and detached, and unlike Kojima, he does not try to transform suffering into something morally significant. His position is essentially that people do things because they can. There may be no deeper moral reason behind suffering, no heaven in which good is rewarded, no hell in which evil is punished, and no inherent meaning behind the power one person has over another. This brings Nietzsche to mind again, although Momose’s philosophy is deliberately a much more nihilistic version of Nietzsche’s ideas. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power is not simply a justification for the strong to dominate the weak. His broader idea was concerned with self-overcoming, the creation of values, and what happens when we can no longer rely on an external moral order to tell us what is good.
What is good? - All that heightens the feelings of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? - All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? - The feeling that power increases - that a resistance is overcome.
This may sound close to Momose’s worldview, but Nietzsche’s idea of power is not the ability to dominate others but the capacity for self-overcoming and creating one’s own values, something that Momose reduces to the much simpler idea that the absence of an external moral order gives one permission to do whatever one can. This leaves the narrator stuck between two incomplete answers. Kojima tells him that suffering can be given meaning, while Momose tells him that it has no meaning at all, and the narrator cannot fully accept either position. The ending does not resolve this conflict with some revelation or triumph over the bullies. Instead, the narrator is forced to confront the possibility that suffering may not contain any inherent meaning, while still recognising that this does not make his experience meaningless. The important thing is what he chooses to do with all this experience and how he responds.
The ending of Heaven is left deliberately unresolved. It does not offer suffering as a lesson or meaninglessness as an answer. It leaves the narrator, and the reader, with the harder possibility that suffering may simply happen, without a reason, and that meaning is something we have to construct and choose how to respond to it. This is also where Heaven differs significantly from the familiar structure of Western young-adult fiction. In many stories about bullying there, adolescence becomes a battlefield to be won. The protagonist is bullied, discovers some hidden strength, finds allies, confronts the bully, and eventually emerges with a clearer sense of self. The cruelty is answered because the story itself promises some form of resolution. Kawakami does not seem to be interested in providing that satisfaction. After Heaven, such resolutions also seem to feel philosophically cheap.
Ninomiya is not a convenient monster, but someone who is socially successful, intelligent, and well regarded by his peers. Momose is similarly secure and detached. The people doing the hurting are not outsiders themselves, but people who have succeeded within the same hierarchy that permits the bullying to happen. There is no obvious antagonist to defeat and no simple moment when justice is restored. The adults are no more reassuring; institutions simply fail, quietly, and all life continues around that failure. This also makes Heaven feel less like a conventional coming-of-age story and more like an examination of what it means to live within a world that does not guarantee resolution. By refusing the familiar young-adult promise, Kawakami leaves the narrator with something much harder and deeper.
I have not experienced bullying on anything like the scale the narrator does, but I recognised the attempt to attach meaning to suffering and the difficulty of overcoming it. In my case, that suffering has at times taken the form of extreme solitude, sometimes of my own making. When I failed to climb out of it, and eventually failed even to try, I began constructing various internal philosophies to justify and accept my state. There is a strange comfort in doing this, almost a feeling of being special. If suffering differentiates a person from everyone else, it becomes easier to believe that there is something valuable in the very thing that is hurting them. The problem is that climbing out then becomes harder, because admitting that loneliness is simply an unfortunate circumstance also means admitting that it could be changed, and that possibility comes with an obligation. It asks something of me, often the uncomfortable task of changing aspects of my own character or behaviour, which is much harder than explaining the loneliness away. This is what makes Kojima’s philosophy particularly recognisable to me. Her suffering becomes part of her identity, and the meaning she gives it eventually becomes so intertwined with who she is that imagining herself outside of it becomes almost as difficult as imagining herself without the suffering itself.
Recognising that trap, however, is easier than escaping it. Understanding why someone has built a philosophy to make suffering bearable does not necessarily make it easier to abandon that philosophy. Insight can become another form of hiding, as a person becomes so articulate about their condition, why they stopped trying, or why their circumstances make sense given everything that came before, that the explanation itself begins to feel like progress.
The way forward, I think, has to begin with understanding one’s own condition, recognising the character traits and internal philosophies that have allowed a person to accept a situation that needs to change, and then either working to change them or recognising the need to reach out for help.