Book Review: Heaven
by Mieko Kawakami
Written by: Frida Nurmarliana
“Maybe we are weak, in a way. But that’s not a bad thing. If we’re
weak, our weakness has real meaning. We may be weak, but we get it. We know
what’s important, and we know what’s wrong.”
Mieko
Kawakami’s Heaven is a quiet,
devastating meditation on adolescence, cruelty, and the human need for connection. The novel follows
two teenagers relentlessly bullied at school: the unnamed narrator, a boy with a lazy eye,
and Kojima, a girl ostracized for being “dirty.” They begin exchanging secret
letters, and through this fragile correspondence, they find someone
who understands what it means to be singled out and
dehumanized.
What struck
me most is Kawakami’s refusal to romanticize suffering. Heaven resists the conventional narrative of redemption or cathartic
resolution. There is no triumphant escape from bullying, no easy moral victory.
Instead, Kawakami lingers on the discomfort, the cruelty of peers, the
complicity of silence, and the suffocating sense that pain might be endless.
Yet, this is not a hopeless book. The friendship between the boy and Kojima is not about fixing each other; it is about survival through recognition. Kawakami shows that sometimes, just being seen by another person can feel radical, a quiet act of resistance against a world that wants to erase you. Kawakami’s prose is spare but cutting, forcing
the reader to sit with emotions we might prefer to look away from.
By the end, I didn’t feel consoled, but I did feel understood. Heaven left
me unsettled, as if holding
up a mirror to all the times I have felt small, invisible, or out of
place.
This is not an easy book to read, but that’s precisely why it matters. It asks us to confront the reality of suffering without turning away and to remember that even in the darkest moments, connection can still bloom.