I don’t really know how to say it, but it’s like something’s wrong, all the time, and I can’t do anything to stop it. It’s always there. When I’m at home, when I’m at school. one is souvenirs, eight-hundred-twenty, wait a minute, wait a minute, eight-hundred-eighty a famous writer, and nine-hundred-twelve a French person. At this point it’s suddenly crowded, full of people, and bicycles are lined up like mechanical goats. However, despite his love for Ms Ice Sandwich, it is Tutti Frutti to whom he becomes close. She invites him to her house to watch a DVD with her father. The father seems to sleep through much of it – the film is Heat– and our narrator finds it particularly violent. Tutti Frutti, however, is particularly carried away by the final shoot-out, so much so that she replays it (she has seen it numerous times before) and even gets our narrator involved in a re-enactment. The way a person can become an Other in society is analyzed in the broader scheme of her works, but also how this happens by being objectified. Physical traits aren’t a valid indication of a person, but it becomes such a large part of the way people choose to see us and value us. Breasts and Eggs scrutinizes how use value in labor is contingent on physical attributes, such as Makiko undergoing breast enhancement surgery despite a large price barrier for the purpose of making her more profitable as a bar employee. Similar to the eye issue in Heaven is the titular character of Ms Ice Sandwich, who underwent facial surgery in hopes of better job placement due to physical beauty (patriarchal gaze abound) but a botched surgery left her with giant eyes that make her an outcast and target for scorn. The use of eyes for this social investigation is brilliant, as eyes are the way we perceive the world around us and are ironically the attribute that is being perceived as demeaning these characters into Otherness.

In Louise Heal Kawai’s translation, the novella is a wonderful example of the power of narrative voice. An innocent stream-of-consciousness draws the reader into the boy’s world and we learn far more about him from grammatical idiosyncrasies and looping vocabulary choices than from the morsels of detail we are fed." - Iain Maloney, The Japan Times Kojima wanted this boy ( called “Eyes” by his classmate bullies)...to meet him after school. She left the location in her note. And that talk between our protagonist and his bully about the philosophy behind bullying. It's hits so hard and so bad. One day... this young boy (our narrator) receives a note from a girl named Kojima. Girls call her “Hazmat”.His classmate's strong and the weak monologue ( Listen, if there is a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it) and living for one’s cravings even more than the physical abuse, unsettles everything in the life of the main character even more. The automatic doors open and out pour people holding white plastic shopping bags stuffed with food. If you want to see somebody you have to make plans to meet, or even make plans to make plans, and next thing you end up not seeing them anymore. That's what's going to happen. If you don't see somebody, you end up never seeing them. And then there's going to be nothing left of them at all. Although this novella is short and simple, a lot is conveyed about the nature of relationships as well as the importance of reaching out to others before we lose our chance to talk with them. The main character I found to be charming, and in a way, he reminded me a lot of the students I work with. He has a strange way of arriving at his logic, and it often doesn't make sense to others. Kawakami has given this character great depth in such a short amount of writing, and I found this novella to be overall quite lovely. I had never read anything by Kawakami Mieko before, but I have to admit that this novella caught my interest from the outset. It might have been very brief and left me yearning for more, but I developed an instant liking to her quirky yet utterly captivating writing style. Ultimately, this is not at all a love story and it was never supposed to be one. Instead, it is a fascinating, touching and quiet coming-of-age story with a plethora of lessons to be taught and inspiring passages.

But things change when he overhears some girls in his school calling his beloved Ms Ice Sandwich a “freak” and “some kind of monster”. There’s a mention of facial reconstruction, and some kind of mistake. He doesn’t understand, and he wants to defend her, but he doesn’t. And then, he stops going to the grocery store. There is no father present and the boy gets limited attention from his mother who is always on her cell phone or computer or in discussion with clients. Women come to their house for astrology readings and fortune-telling with cards. This book has been called a coming-of-age story. I think it’s about the birth of an artist. The boy becomes obsessed with a young lady who sells sandwiches at the supermarket — because of her huge eye lined in blue. He begins to draw her. She is unfriendly but icily efficient at her job. He buys sandwiches from her every day just to look at her.The second book from Pushkin Press's Japanese Novellas series which I am going to review today is Ms Ice Sandwich by Kawakami Mieko (yes, she shares the same last name as Kawakami Hiromi whose Record of a Night Too Brief I reviewed last week, but the two authors have no relation whatsoever as far as I am concerned). Bullying and the tragedy of children trying to find meaning in a world focussed on conformity and the strong, instead of the weak Monday to Friday, and I make sure I put half of it in my coin purse. My sandwich money. To tell the truth, We all see the world in our own way,’ Kojima writes, and sometimes these perspectives on life are uncomfortable and conflicting. On one hand, we have Kojima and her belief in meaning and that there is a moral reward for doing the right thing, like theres a purpose that ‘ understands the meaning of everything we’ve been through when it’s all over.’ For her, someone who allows herself to suffer and continues to present herself in a way that draws scorn, is a right of passage and moral message to the world where everyone else is complicit—especially by inaction to countering the worst abusers and thereby enabling much like Hannah Arendt’s theory of the ‘Banality of Evil’—and therefor she is there to teach them. The book is about bullying and behaviour of bullies and one who get bullied. It's a raw and grounded exploration behind impact of bullying as well as human relationships. Meiko created something frighteningly honest and powerful with her flair of words and dialogue writing.

Like when you’re holding a cat and touch its soft belly. Or when a blanket brushes the top of your feet. I go to the supermarket again, and just like before I stare at Ms Ice Sandwich's awesome eyes, which gives me a brand-new, really happy feeling.Prodded by Tutti, he eventually does reach out and manages to briefly but satisfyingly resolve his obsession with Ms Ice Sandwich. I realize this book takes place from the perspective of a 14 year old, but I would've liked to read something more developed than straightforward, childish thoughts and internal argument. The conversations are surface level, and the atmosphere is poorly established. The syntax is so literal, unadorned, sloppy, straightforward and fast-paced it felt like reading a newspaper. I would have to put this in the same category as Snakes and Earrings, which is pulp, adolescent fiction, not challenging in any way. This is simply my opinion, and I will read anything Kawakami puts out into English. She is certainly capable of establishing a similar output to Banana Yoshimoto or even Dazai, but not if she chooses to continue taking the easy route to popularity. I would like to see her recapture the bent toward magical realism you'll find in her short stories, and strive toward producing complex portrayals of modern life. Tutti also lost a parent -- her mother -- and it's also a loss that is palpable even as it remains unmentioned: "we've never talked about it, but somehow everyone in the class knows that her mother died". His ideology is in direct contrast with Kojima’s belief that their suffering and martyrdom has meaning, claiming ‘ none of this has any meaning. Everyone just does what they want...nothing is good or bad.’ and people just do whatever is possible. Harming others isn’t about their eyes or poorness, he claims, but simply because they are beneath them and able to be hurt. Overall, Ms Ice Sandwich is a very heart-warming and quiet novella about growing up, first love, loss and learning to cope with all these new feelings which inundate kids at that age all of a sudden. I would definitely recommend this to anyone with no exception, as you are certain to gain something upon reading it regardless of your literary preferences.

A) delightful novella (.....) Kawakami’s dialogue, fluidly rendered into English by Louise Heal Kawai, captures beautifully and with great humor the eager dynamism of a child’s mind, guided by chance association and whimsy, as the fourth-grade narrator tugs the reader into his world." - Erik R. Lofgren, World Literature Today The narrator is still childish in his understanding of the world, yet Kawakami effectively presents his fumbling trying to make sense of it. Kojimo has an interesting philosophy on bullying and the reasons behind it. ‘ It’s a painful thing, I know’ she says to the narrator over his eye, which is a frequent impetus for teasing, ‘ but it’s also made you who you are.’ Their signs, as she calls them, that makes them targets, are also what defines them, according to her, due to how it regulates them in the social hierarchy. There is a conversation where the narrator wishes he could be like a regular object the bullies ignore, but Kojima cuts him off to say ‘ that’s what we are to them.’ They are objects of torture objectified by their aberations, he for his eye and she for appearing dirty and poor (‘ you can look as good as anyone else,’ Kojima points out, ‘ it doesn’t even matter if you’re poor,’ which is one of the many doorways into class conflict discourse this novel examines). two-hundred-thirteen to Florida, three-hundred-twenty to polite, three-hundred-eighty to church medicine,Something Kawakami does exceptionally well is create countering arguments without particularly siding with either, letting the novels play out within their frameworks and allowing the reader to make do of them as they will. It’s one of the aspects I enjoy most about her. These differing ideologies function as a nebulous duality to perspectives on life that we see come to play in structures of power and politics all the time. They also present ideas on the meaning of life. Kojima sees suffering as something that will be rewarded later in a very religious sort of sense. Her vision of heaven is personified in a painting she takes the narrator to see, one that shows two people in a basic room together. The first time he saw her, he actually said out loud: "Look at those eyes !", and he couldn't understand why his mother said it was impolite to blurt things like that out, because the woman's eyes really were so amazing. However, when he hears his classmates comment about Ms Ice Sandwich, his fascination wavers. Is he stupid to find her cool? This is a good story, a novella, that I’m tempted to call ‘cute.’ It’s a story of a young Japanese boy, grade school age, who essentially has a crush on a young woman who works in a deli selling sandwiches. I found the writing delicately poetic, lyrical almost, in its depiction of the narrator's interaction with his hostile whereabouts and his plight; also with nature itself as it is perceived by him, through his lazy eye: depthless and, on its part, beautifully overpowering. There is also a touching sense of intimacy in the unfolding of his friendship with Kojima, largely developed through letter-writing and punctuated by moments of silence. The development of their friendship is not strained at all, and does justice to the morose sentiment of Kawakami's vision.