Forty-six-year-old writer Mieko Kawakami became famous for her novel Breasts and Eggs. Even Haruki Murakami, the living legend of Japanese literature, praised her for him. “I will never forget the feeling of utter amazement when I first read the novel,” he noted at the time.
In her homeland, Kawakami won the most important literary awards, but only Heaven was shortlisted for the prestigious International Booker Prize. The novel was translated into Czech by Klára Macúchová. Kawakami was inspired to write the story about a fourteen-year-old visually impaired boy by reading the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. It is said that in it she wanted to question established ideas about good and evil.
In the novel, right from the beginning, he builds an exact copy of the high school environment, where difference is not forgiven. On the contrary, it becomes an invitation to violence. The protagonist Nebe remains nameless except for the nickname Silhavec. His father is forever gone, he grows up with a stepmother and suffers in school because of his eyes. This is one of the most common features of bullying – it most often affects children who are somehow different.
Hell in the pews
However, the things Kawakami talks about are not exceptional. It is a well-known story. Even I experienced similar things at school, so I sometimes put off reading Heaven. To this day, anything related to school still terrifies me. And while I’m sure almost every kid would tell you how much they don’t look forward to the first of September, the start of a new school year did something else to me.
I remember that a few days before returning to the benches I was starting to have a crazy headache. At night, I was woken up by visions of the same group of boys who waited for me every day during breaks to drag me to the bathroom by my hair. I woke up sweaty, with stomach cramps and cried the whole way to school.
In the Czech Republic then, bullying in schools was not such a big topic, but today it is talked about a bit more. And it’s not always good. Kawakami is a rather exceptional phenomenon in this regard, he does not embellish anything in Heaven. It doesn’t tell another story where outsiders face violence head on. As if it was enough to refuse to suffer any longer.
Such stories have little to do with reality. It’s not a pleasant sight. According to the latest survey by the Czech School Inspectorate, the number of cases of bullying has only increased over the past seven years. They had to solve it in more than half of Czech schools. And as Kawakami herself notes in some interviews, the number of child suicides in Japan almost triples every year at the end of summer vacation.
Suffering that has meaning
You won’t find a more complicated plot in Heaven. It’s not even important, Kawakami is the strongest in the descriptions of child violence and at the same time he can show what violence does to the victim. Some scenes are downright chilling, for example when Šilhavc’s classmates force him to eat chalk and drink sewage. Elsewhere, they put a deflated ball on his head and play football with him. The boy has no friends in his surroundings, and the author makes this feeling of loneliness even stronger by paying almost no attention to the descriptions of his surroundings. Because the language of the novel depends more on his inner processes due to the hero’s visual impairment. It is a stark record of feelings and pain.
Šilhavc’s loneliness is soon disturbed by a letter from classmate Kodžimová, a girl who is bullied by others because she doesn’t take care of herself. “We’re friends,” she informs him simply. But their friendship remains secret, they are silent at school, and they don’t always understand each other outside of it. Unlike the main character, who takes his suffering only with difficulty, Kodžimová wears her bullying with pride. She calls the reasons they laugh at her “signs.” He wants to use them to get closer to his poor father.
Kodžimová and Šilhavec continue to write letters to each other, continue to endure attacks from classmates, and from time to time they meet on an abandoned staircase. They have long conversations, sometimes suspiciously mature for fourteen-year-olds. What are they talking about? For example, about morality or suffering. “A person will understand the meaning of many things during his lifetime, only some will come to him after his death,” thinks Kodžimová in one of the conversations, reminding her of medieval martyrs. She too believes that her pain has meaning, she just can’t see it yet. “There will come a time when it will all be over and then we will understand the meaning of all the pain and all that we have been through and overcome.”
Lots of unanswered questions
Reading Nebe is a special experience for someone who has gone through similar experiences as Šilhavec and Kodžimová. While someone else might ask why they didn’t confide in anyone while reading, you understand their silence. If you’re experiencing this kind of bullying, you’ll soon start to feel like you’re the only one left in the world. For those who bully you, the most important thing is to maintain the impression that no one cares about you. It’s an ingenious fuse. If someone offers you a helping hand, you prefer to push it away for fear that it might be another trick.
Bullying will make you mature prematurely. The violence will end someday, but the memories will remain. Thanks to them, the worries of other children will seem unnecessary. In addition to the memories, the shame will stay with you. One day it will come out of feeling that there is something unique about you. They chose you. Then comes the doubts. What if you deserved the pain? What if you attract violence? And what if it’s like Kodžimová says in Heaven: “It’s almost as if we chose this ourselves?”
The novel Heaven asks all these questions. But Kawakami didn’t write a novel only about bullying. The entire book is a skillful exercise in which he pits nihilism and belief in a better life against each other. On the one hand, there is the cynical world of classmates, where only strength matters. “There is no meaning here,” says one of Šilhavc’s classmates. “Everyone just does what they want.” In contrast to this nothingness, you will find Kojimová’s idea that “even weakness is meaningful. It has its real meaning.”
Kawakami does not support either side, the hero himself seems to stand somewhere in the middle. He constantly doubts everything. Even if the bullying ends up in the hospital and the doctor offers him eye surgery. Momose, Šilhavc’s classmate, who mostly just watches the bullying, willingly tells the hero – his bullying has nothing to do with squinting. They say it’s just a coincidence.
Pure beauty
Kojimova and her self-sacrificing suffering compared to Momose’s cold reason actually seem quite insane. Finding meaning in one’s own pain doesn’t make much sense, and Kawakami seems to know it herself. But what does it mean to agree with those who bully you? It goes without saying that they will want you to feel useless, useless. If you ask them why you?, they will answer that it is just a coincidence. There is nothing special, nothing unique about you. You don’t really exist at all.
Kawakami herself recalls in interviews that she wanted to write a novel about the forms of good and evil, about how such a division is not at all simple. The result seems a bit cold and calculating. In addition, the world of the novel is filtered through the distorted view of the protagonist’s eyes. The second cannot be seen in it.
In Heaven is the strongest language. The novel reads as if the author carefully guarded herself throughout the book, limiting herself until she and her characters finally burst into a world full of colors and light. In the final pages, together with Šilhavc’s sight, the surrounding world also recovers. And everything around is suddenly “pure beauty” again. Only there is no one to share it with.
But two hundred pages is perhaps too little for such a topic. The novel does not say anything new about bullying or the relationship between good and evil. And maybe that’s a good thing. Because Kawakami encountered the same thing that I and other victims of bullying know. In reality, bullying gets you nowhere. It won’t help you with anything, it won’t make you a better or stronger individual. All it leaves you with is lifelong trauma.
Kniha: Mieko Kawakami – Nebe (2023)
Translation: Klára Macúchová
2023-07-25 13:30:12
#horror #September #bullying #hope #pain #Seznam #Zpravy
