Heaven: A Novel

Mieko Kawakami is a Japanese writer who first came to prominence in the mid-2000s as a blogger. In her blog, she wrote the beginnings of what would eventually become her 2019 novel Natsu Monogatari, also known by the title of its 2020 English translation, Breasts and Eggs. Her first two novellas were nominated for Japan’s Akutagawa Prize, and the second novella won this accolade in 2007. Kawakami has since been named one of Granta’s Best of Young Japanese Novelists. She has greatly expanded her international readership with the translation of some of her works into English between 2020 and 2022.

Kawakami is known for writing stories that are occupied with questions of morality, identity, and contemporary anxiety. Breasts and Eggs, for instance, has a character who seeks to have breast augmentation surgery, as a result of which her adolescent daughter refuses to speak with her. Kawakami’s 2011 novel, Subete Mayonaka no Koibitotachi, which was translated into English in 2022 as All the Lovers in the Night, revolves around a self-conscious, reclusive woman who forms a friendship with a colleague that upends the routine of her life. Kawakami’s work often wrestles with struggles women endure because of patriarchal notions that determine everything from the division of labor to standards of beauty.

Kawakami is also very interested in children’s inner lives, and she “describes childhood as ‘hell’” (McNeill, David. “Mieko Kawakami: ‘Women are no longer content to shut up.’” The Guardian). Since children have little or no power or agency, Kawakami sees them as victims of adult decisions, which she finds to be a harrowing way to live. Her views on childhood likely stem from her difficult childhood. Kawakami “grew up in a poor family as a young girl” (Goodman, Makenna. “Strong Lights and Dark Shadows: Mieko Kawakami Interviewed. BOMB Magazine). Heaven’s unnamed 14-year-old protagonist is a struggling child who is self-conscious and uneasy around his peers. The novel begins when Kojima reaches out to befriend him, bonding over their shared torment at the hands of class bullies. Though Heaven is an early entry in Kawakami’s oeuvre, it lays the foundations for preoccupations that will appear in a number of her other works.