Ms Ice Sandwich
Mieko Kawakami | Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
★★★★ 4.5
Content note: The book deals with grief, loss of a parent, and the slow approach of death of a loved one. It is not heavy-handed, but it is felt.
This is a novella that fits in a coat pocket and quietly rearranges something inside you. Under a hundred pages. A Japanese boy in fourth grade. A woman at a supermarket sandwich counter with electric-blue eyelids who he cannot stop thinking about. On the surface, that is the entire story. What it actually is that takes longer to put into words, and Kawakami seems to know that. She does not explain herself. She just hands you the boy's interiority and trusts you to feel what he feels.
He does not have a name. He has a dead father he barely remembers, a mother who runs some kind of fortune-telling operation he does not fully understand, a grandmother who is bedridden and cannot speak, and a crush on a woman he has never properly spoken to. He draws her face at the kotatsu table. He counts things. He notices everything. He does not always know what to do with what he notices.
There is something in how Kawakami writes this child that does not fit neatly into the category of "sensitive boy who grew up too fast." He is not performing precocity. He is genuinely wired differently the fixation, the drawing as processing, the hyper-attentiveness to detail that coexists with social bewilderment, the way he circles the same thoughts because the world keeps not making enough sense. He does not have a diagnosis. The book does not need him to. But readers who know that particular frequency of being will recognise it immediately in him.
The Grandmother; She is asleep. She cannot respond. She is dying. And she is still the most present relationship in the book. He sits with her and tells her about Ms Ice Sandwich. He draws at her bedside. He watches her breathe. He thinks about what it will mean when she is not there not in a philosophical way, but in the specific, bewildered way of a child who cannot reconcile Grandma who is asleep with Grandma who is going to die, as if those are two different people and one of them still has time.
Kawakami does something very difficult here. She makes grief tender before it arrives. She does not dramatise it. She lets the boy sit in the room with the fact of it, and she lets the reader sit there too.
His classmate Tutti is one of those characters who arrives in a book like a small weather system. She has also lost a parent. She knows something about pain that she never verbalises, and the friendship between her and the boy is built entirely in that unspoken register two children who have each had something taken from them, keeping each other company without making a fuss about it.
The translation by Louise Heal Kawai deserves its own mention. The prose is minimal in the way that only certain Japanese writing manages sparse enough to feel like negative space, but warm rather than cold. Every sentence is doing exactly what it needs to and no more. There is no reaching for profundity. The profundity arrives because the restraint earned it.
The boy's voice is utterly convincing. He notices adults behaving oddly and files it away without judgment. He has strong feelings he cannot name. He is not articulate about his inner life in the way child narrators in literary fiction often implausibly are. He is articulate in the way a child actually is obliquely, through what he draws, what he obsesses over, what he keeps returning to.
The novella's brevity is both its gift and its limit. Certain threads the mother, in particular feel more gestured at than inhabited. The world just outside the boy's attention exists only as impression. For most of the book, this restraint is correct; occasionally, it feels like a door that was opened and then not quite walked through.
This is a book about the first time you understand that love and loss are the same motion. About sitting in a room with someone who cannot speak to you anymore and speaking to them anyway. About being a child who feels everything at full volume in a world that keeps asking you to turn it down.
It is difficult to explain precisely because it works on you the way real feeling does not through argument or plot, but through accumulation of small, true moments that add up to something you were not expecting to carry home with you.
Readers who liked this book can also read - The Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa