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Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022

Bullying and the tragedy of children trying to find meaning in a world focussed on conformity and the strong, instead of the weak
We are a lot like things already. She bit her lower lip and laughed. You and know both know it isn’t true but that’s what we are for them.

I felt a lot of emotion while reading the book, Heaven is certainly a book with impact, through telling in simple prose the everyday horrors of school life. Beside indignant I also felt weary in the latter half of the book, since the abuse needs to be placed in a juxtaposition with the actions of the main character, and he is profoundly inactive. The philosophical overtones are definitely interesting, and made me feel some of the class mates weren't just bordering on psychopath, but also avid readers of Nietzsche (and me giving Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and for No One only 1 star made these dialogues profoundly annoying to read). For more background on the philosophical themes of the book also refer to this New Yorker article:

Bullying, loneliness, Mieko Kawakami expertly executes these in this book.
For me academic performance was a beacon during school, but that is not a route open to the two outcasts at the heart of Heaven. Kojima and the narrator find each other in being different, but this offers little protection against the outside world. Adults are very much absent and the kids are amorphous mass of conformity enforcers headed by two psychopaths. They even turn someone into a human football (failingly enough through a volleyball).

Art is a kind of an escape, the outcasts take a trip to a museum and visit if I interpret it right, some Chagall's. I don’t think people are in general so uniformly callous, even though I was bullied in class as well. His classmate is like a full blown psychopath, even if his message that people need to do something about their own circumstances is valid enough in the context of the book.
His classmate's strong and the weak monologue (Listen, if there is a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it) and living for one’s cravings even more than the physical abuse, unsettles everything in the life of the main character even more.

Everything comes to a head even more when an option is presented to the narrator of normality. I thought we were friends is the strategy Kojima uses; this kind of manipulative strategy, with people who want a relationship as long as you do what they want, leads to a cathartic scene.
The resolution is intense, but felt also a tad too easy, since one could think that the option was available before already.

The prose of Kawakami is effective, and I wrote down quite some quotes. Still I was less impressed in general than I expected upfront. 3 solids stars and more of the author catalogue to discover in the future!

Quotes:
I told her that in my view hurting and crying were different things.

I can’t express how safe it felt to never be seen

I can lose my sight but I can’t lose my mom - the tragic of kids trying to get their parents get along

What matters is that all the pain all the sadness have meaning

There are all kinds of things I don’t understand in the world but I wanted to understand you

Does anything in the world happen for a reason? I guess the reason is no.

There is no beautiful world where everyone thinks the same way and understand each other perfectly, it doesn’t exist. You think it does, but it is not real.