But all this presents itself as ambient knowledge, inessential to the archetypal drama that will unfold between strong and weak children, in a town that could be anywhere or nowhere. We know, too, that the year is 1991-hence no cell phones, no e-mail, no cyberbullying. We know that “Heaven” takes place somewhere in Japan, and that the Japanese word for bullying, ijime, points to a subtle and brutalizing practice of classroom harassment that national legislation sought to address after several student suicides. “Even the sphinx has eyes-and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths,’ and consequently there is no truth.” The narrator’s eyes function as an ingenious conceptual device-the novel would not work if the narrator were deaf or paralyzed-giving Kawakami a rationale for refusing to describe period details or local haunts. “There are many kinds of eyes,” he wrote. The eye was Nietzsche’s preferred metaphor for the shifting nature of moral truth. They force the narrator to ingest chalk and toilet water they imprison him in a locker and, in the novel’s most throat-tightening scene, they devise a game called “human soccer,” with his head stuffed inside a ball, his gaze no longer wall-eyed but utterly blind. His eye marks him as a target for bullying by other boys, led by Ninomiya-handsome, popular, and at the top of his class-and his quieter sidekick, Momose. “My eyes took in the scenery like a postcard, but when I blinked, it slipped from view, replaced by a new scene,” the narrator says. His world is “flat and lacking depth.” All people and objects come bearing their own “blurry double,” and, for all his anxious squinting and blinking, he can never be sure whether he is “touching the right thing, or touching it the right way.” Descriptions of settings and of physical appearances are willfully, almost comically bland, bereft of the colors and the outlines that give realist fiction its sense of solidity. The fourteen-year-old narrator of “Heaven” has no proper name, but his classmates call him Eyes, on account of his lazy right eye. She simply sets first-person narrations of suffering alongside stumbling dialogues, attempts to make that suffering intelligible to others. Kawakami never evangelizes, never wags a finger. Her plots offer not a moral education according to the precepts of God but an exploration of how our language of morality is grounded in the shifting power among human beings.
Her novels trace how terms of moral value evolve-how “good” and “evil,” or “pain” and “pleasure,” get affixed to ordinary interactions: becoming friends or becoming enemies, fighting or refusing to fight, falling in love or falling into indifference. Rather, her project is, like Nietzsche’s, a genealogical one. Yet Kawakami is interested neither in demonstrating what makes people good nor in delighting in their antisocial perversities. Or that it will revel in nihilism, allowing sadistic teen-agers to do harm not just with impunity but with their author’s admiration. Certainly, there’s a risk that the novel will deliver puffed-up platitudes about the inherent cruelty and sympathy of children.
And one sees the pitfalls before the possibilities. One wonders if Kawakami, enthralled by Zarathustra’s mountainside howlings about the death of God and the will to power, searched for a timely hook on which to hang these out-of-fashion ideas. It is as if she were determined to alert us to the mismatch between the well-worn preoccupations of young-adult fiction and her grand philosophical objectives as if she wanted us to question her ability-anyone’s ability-to draw the two together. Knowing this, there is an admirable brazenness to the way that the Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami describes “ Heaven” (Europa), her novel of ideas, newly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd: “Gaining inspiration from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work takes up the theme of bullying in middle school and addresses the ultimate question of good and evil,” she has written on her Web site. It summons the drowsy cadence of the philosopher, the tedious rehearsal of concepts on loan from antiquated sources. In an age of voice-driven fiction, the phrase “novel of ideas” has an unavoidably dusty ring. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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