“Heaven” by Mieko Kawakami and the price of standing up

Counter Arts Book Club — The infuriating formula of modern-day masterpieces

It is incredibly difficult to write a “masterpiece” while making the readers laugh and lighten their hearts. It is substantially easier to do it while using and abusing human suffering to elicit an emotional response.

“Eyes”, the 14-year-old protagonist of Mieko Kawakami’s novel, earned his nickname because of his lazy eye. Constantly bullied in middle school by a group of downright cruel boys, his life is nothing short of a woken hell. From eating chalks to getting stuffed in a locker, stapled in the hand, and smacked in the head, chest, and knee. Every action would demand a grownup intervention and yet no one seems to notice.

Only a girl does. Only a girl pays him attention and it confuses him.

I felt a surge of misgivings. What did it mean for us to be friends? What was a friend supposed to do? I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

Via a simple exchange of quick notes in class, Eyes and Kojima become friends in misfortune. Just like Eyes, Kojima is tormented by a group of girls, who call her “Hazmat” because of her poor, dirty appearance. Eyes and Kojima are both bullied, relentlessly. They both suffer. They both know it. And yet, at first, they chose not to share their pain. Stashing it away.

In her notes, Kojima was energetic and alive, an entirely different person from the girl I saw in class. Whenever I saw things happen to her, I got this sharp pain in my chest, but as bad as it hurt there was nothing I could do. I didn’t want her knowing that I saw her. I had to look away, pretending not to watch.

It is much better for perpetrators if their victims willingly choose to isolate. Oh, it makes their job infinitely easier. If the victims feel alone, if they feel like no one notices, no one cares, they remain vulnerable, weak, hopeless.

Despite coming together in a genuine friendship, Eyes and Kojima choose not to let the other into their pain, and as a result, they remain isolated even in their relationship. And yet, they both desperately need support.

I couldn’t figure out the real reason she was crying, so we just sat there quietly, together. Kojima stroked the kitten on her bag the same way she had when we were on the train. Maybe it was a nervous tic. She looked up, as if the worst was over, and stared into the sky.

Support is being present for each other. Support is seeing each other’s pain, acknowledging each other’s suffering, especially when no one else would. Supporting each other in the abyss. But raising out of it? That takes a whole different narration that Kawakami did not introduce in her novel.

Are you familiar with slave morality? If you want to read this book. Rather, if you want to read this book and not get too frustrated, you need to know what it means. So, allow me a quick philosophical digression. I will keep it brief.

The master and slave morality is Nietzsche’s great contribution to modern thinking. Whether we should thank him for it or not, we can ask the protagonists of this book, because they are all knee-deep in the mud of Nietzsche’s thinking.

To explain his tale of two moralities, Nietzsche describes an ancient society made up of Masters and Slaves. In Kawakami’s book, the Masters are the bullies, the slaves are Eyes and Kojima, this is clear.

The Masters are as close as it gets to gods. They are strong and empowered. They can do whatever they like and don’t bother themselves with trivial morality questions. They define themselves in opposition to the Slaves who are weak, helpless, and utterly incapable of standing up for themselves. In the school terminology, we are all too familiar with, the Slaves are the losers.

Oppressed by the Masters, day in and day out, the Slaves cannot do what they like. They don’t have the resources for it. They lack whatever makes the Masters rule the world, themselves, and others.

Now, Nietzsche was gracious enough to open up the possibility for a “slave revolt”. But mind you, this is not a physical revolution. This is not a liberation, anticolonial, antiapartheid movement of the twentieth century. Forget about that, Nietzsche’s slaves are too weak and helpless for real, tangible revenge. They can only aspire to a moral one. They can only aspire to laugh in the phase of their oppressors (while the oppression is ongoing), knowing in their hearts that they are morally superior. This moral superiority, trusting that they are inherently good and the Masters are bad, will help them better endure their endless suffering, but alas, suffer they must.

What happens after this moral inversion of values? I don’t know. Kawakami doesn’t know. And poor Eyes and Kojima don’t know either. What is the point of all this? Only that if you choose to read Heaven, you need to ready yourself for a hopeless ride. Hope is meager here, hope is absent, hopelessness will render the way-too-graphic suffering difficult to digest.

Is this book worth your time? I am not sure. Personally, I wouldn’t read it again even if it were the only book left in the world. I guess reading this novel “gifted” me a visualization of what Nietzsche’s morality system would look like if enacted in the flesh. More specifically in the flesh of middle-schoolers in Japan. Middle schoolers who don’t talk about manga, don’t talk about video games, no, middle schoolers who wack each other in the head as hard as possible and give a five-page long monologue on slave morality.

This book review is part of the Counter Arts Book Club for 2023. Thank you Sadie Seroxcat for putting together this booklist! I enjoyed writing this review much more than I enjoyed the actual book :)