Heaven

Heaven is Mieko Kawakami's first full length novel. I really liked Breasts and Eggs so I gave this one a go because of it. It's a pretty simple story about middle school bullying, and morality from teenagers point of view. Kids truly can be the biggest sociopaths and bullying is a pretty good example of that, especially in Japan. It's a topic that's commonly explored in japanese fiction, I've encountered it in pretty much all forms by now lmao. Not just bullying, but the commonly brought up concept that you have to "relieve tension" through violence, porn, rape/prostitution, consuming extremely violent or perverse media in order to stay normal, or whatever. I guess my one complaint was how the characters spoke with each other, at certain moments it felt a bit too unnatural, kind of villain-monologue-like, especially that one conversation with Momose. I'm not sure a bully would be so completely honest with himself when speaking to the bullied, even though I think he was mostly right when it comes to explaining why people bully. Also the MC's.. masturbation habits.. were interesting, both as a parallel of a way of relieving tension and anxiety, and from a point of view of a freshly emerging virgin/whore complex, something the story doesn't really touch upon.

This book is a pretty good exploration of two conflicting ideas - we're suffering for a greater purpose vs. nothing has meaning, and the MC serves as a meeting point of those two. I noticed some people described this book as torture porn or as pretty explicit in its description of bullying, but I don't think it was that horrible. It's a book about bullying so, what you see is what you get. Maybe Mishima's animal torture scene set the standard too high that this didn't even make me flinch lmao. Lastly, I liked the ending, it brought a good conclusion to the conflict.