A fourteen-year-old boy known only by the nickname his tormentors give him is relentlessly bullied at school because of his lazy eye. He endures the cruelty in near-total silence, telling himself that resistance is pointless and that suffering must have some hidden meaning. Then he begins exchanging secret notes with Kojima, a girl in his class who is also singled out for abuse, and the two form a fragile, intense friendship built on shared pain.
Kojima has developed her own private philosophy that reframes their weakness as a kind of chosen strength, a way of enduring that gives the horror around them significance. As the violence escalates, the boy is pulled between her worldview and the chilling, coldly rational arguments of one of his tormentors, forcing him to decide what he actually believes about cruelty, meaning, and how a person should live.
Heaven, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is one of Mieko Kawakami's most acclaimed novels and a finalist for the International Booker Prize. Spare and unflinching, it turns a story of schoolyard bullying into a piercing philosophical inquiry into violence and morality.