I’m a white american, so I’m missing cultural context.

I thought this was going to be too sad and brutal for me. I didn’t know that it was about two kids who are being intensely bullied, and there were points that the violence escalated very quickly and it made me feel angry and powerless. It never felt like Heaven became despair-sploitation, though at times it was close. Kawakami writes beautifully, and there was enough of the sublime woven throughout the story that I felt like I was seeing the course of the stars. I don’t think it’s possible to write a story that is primarily about the relationship between two characters without attempting to come near the sublime, but many authors fail abysmally and Kawakami did not.

Some of the philosophy was poor, but as the story of a middle-schooler attempting to develop an understanding of ethics this made sense in context. Still, the totally amoral predator-prey stance that Momose had is tired, and though I was interested in Kojima’s conceptualization of weakness it was undercut by the character’s insistence that everything happens for a reason. There is also something clearly going on with gender here: Ninomiya (and more importantly Momose) on one end, and Kojima on the other. It is never more explicit than in the final showdown, with the main character caught in-between their perspectives and the true end goal of Momose’s boneheaded masculine style of anything-goes morality (sexual exploitation of women) dragged out into the open. That said, I think the gendered elements, like the discussions of violence, the sublime, and physical appearance, are heavily Japanese though they overlap with global themes. Much of the nuance was lost on me, and will be lost on Western readers. Regardless, Heaven manages to be brainy and poetic despite its occasional clumsiness. The boy and his mother alone made my heart ache.