Sisters in Yellow: Mieko Kawakami (author), Laurel Taylor (translator), Hitomi Yoshio (translator), Pan Macmillan, 448 pages, 2026
For someone still at such a tender age, Mieko Kawakami is a stunningly good writer. She is a novelist, poet and essayist whose internationally acclaimed works — notably Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and Paradise — probe gender, class, bodily experience and social alienation in late‑capitalist Japan.
Heaven, an early work on school bullying and the social formation of suffering; then Breasts and Eggs, which raised questions of reproduction, women’s labour, precarity; and Paradise, the moral and existential problems faced by Japanese women. All her previous work has themes of work, family economy, institutional violence, and bodily commodification. These are all acute portrayals of class stratification, gender oppression, marketised bodies and private suffering under neoliberal Japan.
Kawakami exposes how Japanese neoliberal capitalism commodifies bodies, care and intimacy, producing isolation, mental distress and precarious survival strategies. Her work demonstrates how private suffering is socially produced rather than merely individual pathology. She highlights the intersection of gender oppression and class exploitation in everyday life.
While the reader is free to read Kawakami as they like, reading Kawakami through a Marxist lens develops the capacity to see private affliction as a social product and to analyse cultural form as ideology.
Sisters in Yellow is a 2023 novel by Mieko Kawakami, translated into English by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, and was published in March 2026. The title and the bar's name ("Lemon") refer to Hana's obsession with a feng shui belief that the colour yellow attracts wealth and financial security. Kawakami has described the novel as an exploration of a Breaking Bad-style story without the typical "macho drama."
It's a crime-infused story about friendship, betrayal, and survival in 1990s Tokyo, following 15-year-old Hana and her older friend Kimiko as they open a bar called Lemon, which becomes a haven but leads them into a world of crime and desperation. The novel explores themes of poverty, female resilience, and the harsh realities of life on the fringes of society, blending social realism with thriller elements.
Kawakami often portrays the pressures of precarious labour, consumerist culture, and gendered norms. Sisters in Yellow registers social vulnerability through small, intimate details that encode larger class relations. Her book shows everyday scenes of work: casual, piecemeal paid work, and precarious hours. They are material signs of neoliberal precarity. Part‑time shifts, temporary cleaning/retail tasks, work that starts or ends at odd hours, or days lost to cancelled gigs. These concrete markers show labour organised in fragments rather than stable employment. It must be understood that fragmented labour time is not accidental but a mode of disciplining labour power — keeping wages low and workers on call so capital can extract more surplus. This corresponds to the global growth of informal and platform work, where “casual labour” and algorithmic scheduling spread precarious conditions. According to the latest statistics, over 2.1 billion workers are in informal work worldwide.
Kawakami is part of a formidable new generation of Japanese writers. Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab-Canning Ship), essays and short stories by proletarian writers, modernists like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and later novelists who grapple with imperialism and postwar capitalism.
A significant section of modern Japanese literature exposes how culture can conceal and reveal class exploitation, how nationalism and militarism are built into cultural forms. The recent resurgence of proletarian texts shows literature's capacity to rekindle class consciousness in periods of economic crisis—an opening for political work among youth and precarious layers.
Given that Japanese women have borne the brunt of neoliberalisation, it is not surprising that some of the most important modern Japanese writers are women. Female Japanese literature today often grapples with precarity, social withdrawal (hikikomori), ageing, and the collapse of secure employment—issues central to contemporary class struggle. Japan’s casualised labour market, suicides and social isolation show the objective conditions that many recent novels and short stories dramatise.
Readers interested in the class struggle, gender, and Japanese imperialism are encouraged to read Higuchi Ichiyō, Hayashi Fumiko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Hiratsuka Raichō, and Yosano Akiko. Higuchi Ichiyō — “Takekurabe / Growing Up” (short story). A compassionate, class‑conscious portrayal of poor urban youth and women’s constrained social options under early modern capitalism. A good entry point to Meiji-era class/gender conditions. Hayashi Fumiko — Diary of a Vagabond (Nomad’s Diary) and selected short stories. Hayashi’s work offers vivid, autobiographical glimpses into the itinerant, precarious lives of women in the interwar period and the underside of urban labour markets.
Miyamoto Yuriko — fiction and essays from the 1920s–1940s. Miyamoto was politically engaged with left movements, and her writing expresses proletarian themes and women’s emancipation, and connects with the politics of the day; her work is useful for seeing how committed women writers sought to fuse literary and political struggle. Hiratsuka Raichō — essays and Seitosha (Bluestocking) journal writings. As founder of Japan’s early feminist journal Seito (1911–16), Hiratsuka’s polemics illuminate feminist demands, cultural critique and their tensions with rising national politics—Yosano Akiko — poetry and essays. Yosano’s career illustrates the ambivalence of some feminist-modernist currents that combined emancipation rhetoric with nationalist sentiment; studying her work shows how gender politics can be co‑opted by imperialist ideology.
These writers retain a contemporary resonance and how patriarchy, precarity and imperialist expansion are mutually reinforcing: gender oppression is intensified by capitalist industrialisation and militarism; nationalism and imperialism can co‑opt feminist rhetoric; and working‑class women are often the most exposed to dispossession and colonial violence. Understanding these dynamics strengthens contemporary anti‑imperialist, feminist and socialist practice by identifying the material roots of ideological illusions.
Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important contemporary Japanese writers because her work combines rigorous attention to individual subjectivity with an unflinching portrayal of the social forces that shape and deform everyday life. Mieko Kawakami is important not because she offers tidy political answers, but because her art reveals how capitalism structures pain and possibility. Sisters in Yellow is a book I heartily recommend.
Author
(born 1976) is a celebrated Japanese author, poet, and former singer-songwriter known for her visceral exploration of the female body, economic class, and social ethics. Originally from Osaka, she worked as a factory hand and a bar hostess before gaining national fame as a blogger and eventually a novelist.
All the Lovers in the Night, Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett
(trans), David Boyd (trans) (Europa Editions, Picador, May 2022)
“In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound
that could only be described as sparkling. It made my head sway, and my breath
grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet
of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then
fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another
step, gently showing me the way.”
All the Lovers in the Night
‘I want to write about real people,’
Mieko Kawakami
“There are just as many memories as there are people, so
there’s no correct version of one event. That’s why we need many different
kinds of voices and experiences, and by reading those voices, we understand and
construct a bigger picture of the world.”
Mieko Kawakami.
“Those Who Fight Most Energetically and Persistently for the
New Are Those Who Suffer Most from the Old”
Leon Trotsky
All the Lovers In the Night is Mieko Kawakami’s third novel.
The book covers similar ground to her previous books, " Breasts and Eggs
and Heaven. All three books were translated into English by Sam Bett and David
Boyd, with Breasts and Eggs having sold over 250,000 copies in thirty
countries. Kawakami’s novels have come under sustained criticism from Japanese
conservatives, Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s former governor and a former
novelist, called them “unpleasant and intolerable”.
Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important writers to come
out of Japan. Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976. Her family were working class
and poor. She was forced to work in a factory at the age of making heaters and
electric fans. Later she had a job as a hostess and a singing career, finally
becoming a blogger and a poet. She has almost single-handily dragged Japanese
literature into the 21st century. She won many awards, including the Akutagawa
Prize, in 2008. Haruki Murakami, one of the most important Japanese novelists,
praised the writer, saying Kawakami is “always ceaselessly growing and
evolving.” However, Kawakami has not always liked Murakami's portrayal of
women.[1] In a 2017 interview with Murakami,
she opposed his perceived sexism, saying, “I’m talking about the large number
of female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function” and “Women
are no longer content to shut up,”
All the Lovers in the Night covers the life of a
working-class Japanese girl, Fuyuko Irie, a proofreader in Tokyo. Fuyuko is a
typical character used by Kawakami, a person who is single, childless, largely
a loner and travels through life unnoticed and unloved.
As Fuyuko Irie says, “What I saw in the reflection was
myself, in a cardigan and faded jeans, at the age of thirty-four. Just a
miserable woman who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day like this, on
her own in the city, desperately hugging a bag full to bursting with the kind
of things that other people wave off or throw in the trash the first chance
they get.”
There is cleverness in how “All the Lovers in the Night”
addresses all the changes in the book's main protagonists. Kawakami never
judges her characters and empathises with them/. As Joshua Krook writes, “If
there is a core question in Kawakami’s work, it is what the oppressed should do
to feel okay with themselves. Most of her stories feature people who are
ignored or mistreated by society, with many having psychological problems
stemming from their mistreatment. The protagonists cling onto one or two people
as lifelines that keep them afloat in the storm.”[2]
Kawakami’s Treatment of Irie’s alcoholism is particularly
sensitive. Alcoholism seems to be a major problem in Japanese society. Just
typing in Google search engine for alcoholism amongst young Japanese women
brings up many articles.
A recent study found that “young Japanese people drink much
more alcohol than the global average. In 2020, 73 per cent of men aged 15 to 39
in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol compared to 39 per cent of their male
peers globally. The difference was even starker for Japanese women: 62 per cent
of women aged 15 to 39 years in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020
compared to just 13 per cent of young women globally.”[3]
Kawakami is not shy about discussing subjects barely
mentioned in Japanese or, come to that matter, in Western Society, such as
social class and gender. Her treatment of sexual violence towards women is one
such issue. As Cameron Bassindale writes in his book review, “It reaches a
nadir in tone when Kawakami produces a chapter detailing sexual violence which
is so visceral and believable it will leave those weak of temperament wondering
why they ever picked up this book. That is to say, Kawakami has truly outdone
herself, surpassing even her lofty expectations of creating a narrative which
is immediate and realistic; this English translation is a gift to anyone
wishing to understand life for the modern Japanese woman and the perils and
hardships many women face. Of course, no two human experiences are the same,
and that point is apparent in the contrast between the female characters in the
novel; however, the space between men and women in the book tells the state of
gender relations in Japan. It is up to the reader to draw their conclusions.”[4]
Several middle-class reviewers like Mia Levitan have sought
to position Kawakami as some “literary feminist icon”. Levitan writes, “
Anti-heroines aching for erasure may point to a broader unease. Kyle Chayka,
the author of The Longing For Less (2020), posits that a modern
desire for nothingness stems from overstimulation. Or it may be a reaction to
“girl-boss” feminism. “Instead of forcing optimism and self-love down our
throats . . . I think feminism should
acknowledge that being a girl in this world is hard,” suggests Audrey
Wollen, the Los Angeles-based artist who became known in 2014 for her “Sad Girl
Theory”, which reframes sadness as a form of protest.”
A turn towards feminism cannot solve the problems women face
in Kawakami's books or in real life. The plight of working-class women in Japan
or anywhere else is inseparably linked to the plight of the working class.
As Kate Randall correctly points out, “The fight for women’s
rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class
struggle.As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning
class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the
working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially
useless existence.”[5]
All the Lovers in the Night is well-written, eminently
readable, and sometimes beautiful. Although largely written about womanhood, it
is still a great novel, and one looks forward to Kawakami’s future work.
[1] A Feminist Critique of Murakami
Novels, With Murakami Himself-
https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/
[2] https://newintrigue.com/2021/06/18/the-writing-of-mieko-kawakami/
[3] Population-level risks of alcohol
consumption by amount, geography, age, sex, and year: a systematic analysis for
the Global Burden of Disease Study
2020- www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00847-9/fulltext
[4] bookmarks.reviews/reviewer/cameron-bassindale/
[5] The condition of working-class
women on Internation
Breasts and Eggs-by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the
Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd-Europa, 430 pp., $27.00; $16.95 (paper)
"I guess she was one of those people you see a lot
these days who looked young from behind, but the second that she turned
around…. Her fake teeth were noticeably yellow, and the metal made her gums
look black. Her faded perm had thinned so much that you could see the
perspiration on her scalp. She was wearing way too much foundation. It made her
face look washed out and more wrinkly than it was. When she laughed, the sinews
of her neck popped out. Her sunken eyes called attention to their sockets."
Breasts and Eggs
'Women are no longer content to shut up'
Mieko Kawakami
"the dominant view today is that women have always been
to some degree oppressed—the usual term is "dominated"—by men because
men are stronger, they are responsible for fighting, and it is in their nature
to be more aggressive. Common among those who discuss sex roles are blunt
judgments, empirically phrased, that casually relegate to the wastebasket of
history".
F Engels
Reading Mieko Kawakami's novel Breasts and Eggs, one
concludes that it is not easy being a working-class woman in any country at the
moment. Described as a Feminist, Kawakami seems more interested in describing
the human condition rather than being saddled with this unsatisfactory label.
Her opposition to being called a Feminist writer has not
stopped numerous people from labelling her so and a fighter against male
domination. While God forbid that she stops writing the way she does, it would
improve her writing if she imbued her characters with a little historical
perspective. After all, men's relationship with women has been around for a
long time and is a complex issue. While she would be met with hails of derision
from her Feminist readers, she could do no worse than consult Friedrich Engel's
extraordinary book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Engels writes eloquently, "the dominant view today is
that women have always been to some degree oppressed—the usual term is
"dominated"—by men, because men are stronger, they are responsible
for fighting, and it is in their nature to be more aggressive. Common among
those who discuss sex roles are blunt judgments, empirically phrased, that
casually relegate to the wastebasket of history the profound questions about
women's status that were raised by nineteenth-century writers. "It is
common sociological truth that in all societies authority is held by men, not
women," writes Beidelman; "At both primitive and advanced levels, men
regularly tend to dominate women," states Goldschmidt; "Men have
always been politically and economically dominant over women," reports
Harris. Some women join in. Women's work is always "private," while
"roles within the public sphere are the province of men," writes
Hammond and Jablow. Therefore "women can exert influence outside the
family only indirectly through their influence on their kinsmen".
The first problem with such statements is their lack of
historical perspective. To generalise from cross-cultural data gathered almost
wholly in the twentieth century is to ignore changes that have been taking
place for anywhere up to five hundred years as a result of involvement, first
with European mercantilism, then with full-scale colonialism and imperialism.
Indeed, there is almost a kind of racism involved, an assumption that the
cultures of Third World peoples have virtually stood still until destroyed by
the recent mushrooming of urban industrialism. Certainly, one of the most
consistent and widely documented changes during the colonial period was a
decline in the status of women relative to men. The causes were partly
indirect, as the introduction of wage labour for men, and the trade of basic
commodities, speeded up processes whereby tribal collectives were breaking up
into individual family units, in which women and children were becoming
economically dependent on single men. The process was aided by the formal
allocation to men of whatever public authority and legal right of ownership was
allowed in colonial situations, by missionary teachings, and by the persistence
of Europeans in dealing with men as the holders of all formal authority. The
second problem with statements like the above is largely a theoretical one. The
common use of some polar dimension to assess woman's position and to find that
everywhere men are "dominant" and hold authority over women not only
ignores the World's history but transmutes the totality of tribal
decision-making structures (as we try to reconstruct them) into the power terms
of our society.[1]
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Mieko Kawakami |
Breasts and Eggs is Kawakami's first full-length novel for
English-language readers. This novel takes its characters and setting from a
short novella published in 2008 and was awarded Japan's prestigious Akutagawa
Prize. This book, it must be said, is not an easy read. The novelist and
politician Shintaro Ishihara described Breasts and Eggs as "unpleasant and
intolerable". This statement, however, can be taken in many ways.
While it is perhaps unusual for two people to translate a
book, it is beautifully done by Sam Bett and David Boyd. However, they have
faced criticism for moving away from the essence of Kawakami's use of the Osaka
dialect, Which reinforces the working class nature of her characters. The
dispute over their translation is above my pay grade, so I will leave it to
others to argue the merit.
Madeleine Thien writes in her review, "the real Osaka
dialect is not even about communicating. It is a contest. How can I put it?
It's an art" – translators Bett and Boyd do not render it. In 2012, an
excerpt of Breasts and Eggs was published by another translator, Louise Heal
Kawai, who offers Makiko's "I've been thinking about getting breast
implants" as "Natsuko, I am thinking of getting me boobs done".
Kawai compares the Osaka dialect to Mancunian: rough, friendly, outspoken. In
Bett and Boyd's translation, Kawakami's feminism is vivid, but the language
occasionally feels placid; meanwhile, in Kawai's translation, feminism and
language collide in a way that feels deliciously irreverent. Here is Brett and
Boyd, translating Midoriko's response to her mother's desire for surgery:
"It's gross, I really don't understand. It's so, so, so, so, so, so gross
… She's being an idiot, the biggest idiot." Here is Kawai: "I don't
get it. PUKE PUKE PUKE PUKE PUKE! … She's off her trolley, my Mum, daft, barmy,
bonkers, thick as two short planks."[2]
To what extent this is an autobiographical piece will be
known only to some extent by the author. Maybe women will have a closer bond
with the characters in the book, but as a man, the plight of the women in the
book also forces the male reader to confront their past and how they fit into
the modern-day World.
The book's narrator represents a new generation of Japanese
women who, while rejecting much of Japanese cultural, social and political
norms, have yet to strike out in a new direction. Sarah Chihaya writes,
"The idea that a woman, or anyone for that matter, might be able to
articulate and lay claim to exactly what they want is laughably unsuited to
these uncertain times. So what kinds of novels can be written about women who
may not want anything from a world that may not have anything to offer them?".[3]
The book is divided into two parts, Breasts and Eggs. I am
not inclined to separate the book into parts. The book deals with many problems
of everyday life. Kawakami's first chapter is titled "Are You Poor?".
It must be said that Kawakami is one of the few writers addressing the problems
faced by working-class women in society. Her work cuts across the
money-grabbing women of the #MeToo movement
The main character in the book is largely unconcerned with
desirability, romance, or sexual pleasure but has yet to find a replacement for
these basic social mores. She is not content with putting up with how she has
been treated in the past but has yet to formulate a social or political way
forward. One feels this novel is closer to the author's life than she may let
on. The intensity of this study of Japanese working-class women forces both
male and female readers to re-examine their own lives.
Kawakami is a precise and razor-sharp writer who discusses
complex and sensitive subjects honestly and sensitively. She is a keen observer
of the problems faced by working-class women. As this brutally honest depiction
of one of the characters in the book shows, "Natsu sees everything and
everyone she encounters, including herself; its dryness saps the poignancy from
statements like "She reminded me of Mom." It is not that Natsu is
devoid of emotion—her sadness at the earlier loss of her beloved grandmother is
apparent throughout the novel. Yet that sadness, and her loneliness and
estrangement, do not lead to yearning or desire. Mothers and grandmothers haunt
all of the women in this novel, not just Natsu and Maki, but their ghosts do
not emit the glow of family romance. Rather, the spectral presences are
reminders of the accumulating malaise of the female body as it participates,
willingly or unwillingly, in the mingled economies of labour and sexual
desire—as one of Natsu's not-quite-friends unforgettably declares, their
mothers and their mothers before them were just "free labour with a
pussy." While a powerful bond of love joins these successive generations,
it is a luxury that contemporary women's schedules cannot often afford".
One can see why the novel was harshly criticised in some
conservative quarters because it exposes the horrendous plight of working-class
women in Japanese society that treats them as second-class citizens.
As Vrinda Nabar writes, "It is easy to understand the
outrage caused by Breasts and Eggs among a section of readers in Japan.
Published in a newly expanded form in English translation in April this year,
the novel's titillating title belies its upfront focus on themes that have less
to do with female anatomy and more with the ways many women have quietly
subverted gender roles. The discursive style allows its narrator Natsuko
Natsume (a blogger nobody reads), to touch on several aspects of a single
woman's life in Tokyo".[4]
Like all good writers, Kawakami draws heavily on her own
experiences as a woman in modern Japan. However, there is nothing parochial
about her work as she discusses universal themes of loneliness and sexuality in
capitalist society. Her novels have struck a chord with hundreds of thousands
of her readers. I highly recommend this book and cannot wait to read and review
her new book. [5]
[1] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5128-engels-and-the-history-of-women-s-oppression
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/11/breasts-and-eggs-by-mieko-kawakami-review-an-interrogation-of-the-female-condition
[3] https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-new-york-review-of-books/20210429/281573768498656
[4] https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-breasts-and-eggs-a-novel-by-mieko-kawakami/story-gu4VLuf12Xofl726VXpTgM.html
[5] All The Lovers in the
Night-Picador 2022
Heaven: A Novel by Mieko Kawakami-Translator: Sam Bett
and David Boyd-New York. Europa Editions. 2021. 192 pages.
"Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The
socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the
pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make
him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never
unequal rights but the claim of "equal" rights"—Nietzsche's The
Anti-Christ, 1888
"I was always quite a philosophical child, asking odd
questions and in a hurry to grow up". Mieko Kawakami
"'Progress' is a modern idea, which is to say it is a
false idea."—Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ, 1888
Mieko Kawakami latest novel, excellently translated by Sam
Bett and David Boyd, is a brutal examination of adolescence in Japanese
society. The book is drawn from her childhood in Osaka, Japan. By all accounts,
it was a pretty bad experience. Her father was never home. Forced into being
the main breadwinner at a tender age to support her family gave her the ability
to write this "novel of ideas" ". As Kawakami says,
"I was always quite a philosophical child, asking odd questions and in a
hurry to grow up".
Kawakami started to write at a very early age. She explains
that "I try to write from the child's perspective—how they see the world.
Coming to the realisation you are alive is such a shock. One day, we are thrown
into life without warning."
In an interview with The Japan Times, Kawakami says, "I
wanted to create a story that examines how religion, ethics and friendship
influence human relationships," she says. "Do we live our lives under
the guidance of something bigger, like spiritual or ethical beliefs, or do we
live as individuals?".[1]
As Elaine Margolin perceptively writes, "Kawakami is
captivated by that precious time of life when one is on the cusp of adulthood
but still really a child. The author's ability to mimic the rhythmic
disturbances of a teenage mind is mesmerising; she is a master of the interior
voice. She instinctively grasps how one can feel silly and light one moment and
be in the throes of anguish the next. In one of her earlier novels, Ms Ice
Sandwich, she describes a lonely boy whose family is in disarray, finding solace
by visiting a supermarket worker each day who kindly gives him an egg
sandwich".[2]
The book's theme of childhood bullying is a universal one.
" Kawakami explains that the nature of bullying has changed. "In the
old days, there were just two places for relationships — home or school — but
now, with social media, there is nowhere to hide, and the pressure is constant.
Victims of bullying think the whole world knows they are being bullied. It is
even crueller today with the way it can be spread."
I still remember my childhood bully. His name was Desmond
Kavanagh. His reign of terror did not last too long. Unlike Kawamaki's
character, who does not fight back, one person in my school had enough of
Kavanagh's bullying and kicked the crap out of him. The bizarre thing is that
Kavanagh tried to befriend me on Friends Reunited a few years later.
Novel of Ideas
Heaven has been described as a novel about ideas. Writing a
"novel of Ideas" is a complicated business. Kawakami draws heavily on
the work of philosophers like Frederich Nietzsche and Kant. A blog that she
started to promote her singing career, "Critique of Pure Sadness,"
displayed an unhealthy fascination with Kant. Her latest book leans heavily on
Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is a very unfortunate choice,
especially for such a young writer. Nietzsche's hostility towards the working
class and socialism and his disdain for objective truth made him a favourite
writer of the Nazi movement.
As Stefan Steinberg states, "Apologists for Nietzsche
seek to distance him from the policy and activities of the Nazis. But is
Nietzsche's position here so remote from Adolph Hitler's entreaty, in an
internal NSDAP memo of 1922, for the: "most uncompromising and brutal
determination to destroy and liquidate Marxism"? Adolph Hitler was
certainly no philosopher, just as Nietzsche was not merely a political
ideologue. But who can reasonably doubt that the former had little difficulty
in seamlessly incorporating the latter's thoroughly backwards-looking programme
of biological racism, hatred of socialism and the concept of social
equality—together with his advocacy of militarism and war—into the eclectic
baggage of ideas which constituted the programme of National Socialism"?.[3]
The strength of the novel is Kawamaki's examination of ideas
as a way of writing a novel. As Merve Emre writes, "dreamlike expression
of their fledgling ideas has an artistic value that flies in the face of
critics like Northrop Frye, who believed that an "interest in ideas and
theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the
technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships."
But "Heaven" also models a rigorous and elegant process of inquiry
that can transcend its pared-down fictional world. It agitates against the
enduring idea that the best novels concern themselves with the singular minds
and manners of people, offering no resources for the political and moral
demands of "real life." The narrator's persecutor Ninomiya
energetically parrots this argument".[4]
Kawakami, ability to write from a child's perspective is
astonishing at times and avoids what one writer says are "puffed-up
platitudes about the inherent cruelty and sympathy of children".
If I am generous, I would say that Kawakami also avoids
Nietzsche's social and political pessimism and presents the world of children
accurately. One major criticism is that, unlike many great Japanese writers,
such as Yukio Mishima and Kazuo Ishiguro, she does not place her characters in
this book in a social or political context. The reader would not know that
while "Heaven" takes place in Japan, bullying is rife in Japanese
society so much that classroom harassment forced a government to bring in
national legislation because of a growing number of student suicides.
To conclude, Kawakami's work is well worth reading. Her
fiction deals with the problems of everyday life for working-class people in
Japan. That is one of the reasons behind her popularity. She examines critical
social issues that permeate Japanese society. These include broken families,
absent fathers and children struggling to find themselves in a increasingly
cruel world. It is hoped that she does not spend too much time absorbing
Nietzsche's works and instead let herself be influenced by some more healthy
writers such as Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. She has a bright future, and I
look forward to her next novel.
About the Author
Mieko Kawakami is the author of the novel Breasts and Eggs,
a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of TIME's Best 10 Books of
2020. She was born in Osaka. Kawakami made her writing debut as a poet in 2006
and published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, in 2007. Her
writing is deeply imbued with poetic qualities. Her work concentrates on the
plight of women in Japanese society. Her works have been translated into many
languages and are available all over the world. She has received numerous
prestigious literary awards in Japan for her work, including the Akutagawa
Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize.
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2021/05/27/books/heaven-mieko-kawakami/
[2]https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2021/spring/heaven-novel-mieko-kawakami
[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/10/niet-o21.html
[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/a-japanese-novelists-tale-of-bullying-and-nietzsche
