Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

"A raw, painful, and tender portrait of adolescent misery... This book is very likely to make you cry."--Lily Meyer, NPR

With profound tenderness and sensitivity, Japanese literary superstar Mieko Kawakami turns her unique gaze onto the causes and effects of violence. Raw but revelatory, this novel stands as a dazzling confirmation of Kawakami's standing as one of her country's most insightful and compelling novelists.

In Heaven, a shy high-school student is subjected to bullying from his classmates and the only person capable of understanding his ordeal is a young classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors. Each finds in the other a unique sensibility capable of offering not only solace but also a fresh perspective on their predicaments.

Mieko Kawakami, who was born in the prefecture of Osaka, began her career as a singer and songwriter before turning to writing in 2006. Her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, was nominated for the Akutagawa Award and won the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers when it was published in 2007. Breasts and Eggs, a short novella, was released the next year. It was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary distinction, and praised by noted author Yoko Ogawa. Paradise, The Night Belongs to Lovers, and the substantially extended Breasts and Eggs, Kawakami's first novel published in English, are among her works.