Ms Ice Sandwich: Mieko Kawakami (Japanese Novellas)

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The novella offers the narrator’s amusing insights into his fourth-grade life as he reacts to a world he is trying to comprehend. His grandmother is dying. He isn’t sure what to make of concepts like aging and death. Girls and adults are mysterious, but Ms. Ice Sandwich is the most mysterious of all. The plot itself might seem simple, but Mieko Kawakami succeeded in making the narrator’s voice a great balance of childish naivety and clear insight. Especially his conversation with his classmate Tutti surprised me with its emotional message. It also positions her better to understand what the boy is facing -- including prodding him to face Ms Ice Sandwich, which is, in fact a prodding to do much more, as, unspoken, they also both understand that the boy is preparing for another loss (and, indeed, all the losses that accumulate in a lifetime). 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. There's a classmate who lives nearby, Tutti, and he describes a variety of encounters with her; she, too, is very different from him, but they find -- on and off, in the fourth-grade way -- a sort of connection, too, and repeatedly turn to one another.

The boy is close to his mother, but there's a disconnect there; they're different people, and they somehow don't have that much to say to each other. one is souvenirs, eight-hundred-twenty, wait a minute, wait a minute, eight-hundred-eighty a famous writer, and nine-hundred-twelve a French person. At this point it’s suddenly crowded, full of people, and bicycles are lined up like mechanical goats.Ms Ice Sandwich is a story of emotions and feelings more than events. The novel’s limitations are also its strengths. The novella uses no more words than it needs. It does not pretend to be epic. Its focus is narrow, but the small world that the narrator inhabits is rich with the kind of details that children notice and that adults take for granted, like the sensation of falling snowflakes. The story is small but the novella’s lessons are large. That’s quite an achievement.

This belief, which also views people as victims to normalcy and an oppressive social system they are being used within, is countered by one of the bullies. ‘ There’s no beautiful world where everyone things the same way and they all understand each other,’ Momose, the near emotionless and potentially sociopathic (or, for literary purposes, the watcher figure of the novel) bully character asserts. This idea of heaven in the mundane encaptulates her existence and the painting is highly symbolic and something we have to take from her on faith, being only symbolic in a sense like in Woolf's To the Lighthouse as we never actually see the painting. Momose, however, does not see meaning or purpose in anything, so everything is thereby permissable and consquences are only for those who let someone get the better of them. They can enforce rules onto others, but don't truly believe rules apply. I don’t really know how to say it, but it’s like something’s wrong, all the time, and I can’t do anything to stop it. It’s always there. When I’m at home, when I’m at school. He noticed her when he went shopping with his mother and always tries to buy a sandwich from her. He now sometimes goes on his own and spends his limited money on a cheap egg sandwich. He does not really like sandwiches. Ms Ice Sandwich is very efficient but she is not very friendly, either to him or to her other customers.His ideology is in direct contrast with Kojima’s belief that their suffering and martyrdom has meaning, claiming ‘ none of this has any meaning. Everyone just does what they want...nothing is good or bad.’ and people just do whatever is possible. Harming others isn’t about their eyes or poorness, he claims, but simply because they are beneath them and able to be hurt. Heaven was so hard to read and to rate. The subject is heartbreaking, namely bullying in school. The writing is not difficult but I had to skip some passages where the bulling was described in detail. I guess I am quite sensitive when it comes to violence towards children, being it incurred by adults or young aggressors. For this reason I preferred the written ebook in Romanian to the narration in English. I tried both options but it was easier to skim read what made me too emotional. Since the novel was nominated for a translation to English, I probably have cheated reading half of it in Romanian but it was a good opportunity to compare translations. Both were pretty good, although I cannot compare them with the original. The story is narrated from the perspective of the boy, and one of my favourite things about this book is the ability of the author to reproduce the mind and thoughts of a gifted child. It reminded me of a mixture between The perks of being a wallflower and Convenience store woman. I also liked very much the character of Ms Ice Sandwhich herself. The protagonist, who's different from the other kids and subconsciously feels it, likes her because she is also different: she has an "unconventional beauty", and I found this very sweet and touching.

It makes me think of the protagonist’s gender – why did Kawakami choose a boy instead of a girl? Is it because a girl would never work with the storyline she had in mind? Have I had the similar feelings for a grown man when I was the protagonist’s age? The simple answer is no. But then, I also thought about – what about grown women? None as well. But I believe a queer perspective(s) in Kawakami’s work would surely make it a more glorious read. However, when he hears his classmates comment about Ms Ice Sandwich, his fascination wavers. Is he stupid to find her cool? Overall, Ms Ice Sandwich is a very heart-warming and quiet novella about growing up, first love, loss and learning to cope with all these new feelings which inundate kids at that age all of a sudden. I would definitely recommend this to anyone with no exception, as you are certain to gain something upon reading it regardless of your literary preferences.

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The extended, exceedingly harrowing, and bloody bullying episode – in which the narrator gets heavily injured and must go to the hospital – builds up to the confrontation, between the narrator and Momose, on which the entire thrust of the novel's philosophical questioning seems to rest. I would argue, however, that the confrontation scene presents some important issues. Essentially, it is baffling that Momose should be expected to take upon himself the weighty task of recalibrating the morality question, with claims and statements that can hardly be those of a 14-year-old. The level of unconvincing discourse at such a momentous and critical point of the narration is not what I would have expected. Insofar as it is a pivotal movement in the novel, I cannot help but feel that the somewhat awkward, inadequately handled, and overall unsatisfactory execution of this scene is far from being a trivial matter, and sadly undermines the narrative cohesion. It is as if Kawakami gets carried away by the desire to trace a philosophically complex tabula of the morality question, removing her characters from their determining contexts. In essence, Momose calls forth the idea that 'It couldn't be any simpler. People do what they can get away with.' Acting, therefore, on the spur of the moment; purely doing things on a whim. Irrespective of the person on the receiving end. Because what matters, from where the bullies are standing, is following one's urges, whatever they may be.