Heaven: A Novel

“I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I agreed. I felt a surge of misgivings. What did it mean for us to be friends? What was a friend supposed to do? I couldn’t bring myself to ask.”

The first time the narrator meets Kojima, he is so surprised by her request to be friends that he begins to wonder what she expects of him. This points to the narrator’s extreme self-consciousness. On one hand, it makes him very reflective. On the other hand, it causes him to be easily intimidated in social situations.

“We only ever wrote about unimportant things, but over time we came to understand each other.”

In this passage, the narrator observes that friendship is built over sharing “unimportant things.” This stresses how there is no pretense of usefulness in a friendship like that between Kojima and the narrator. Kojima does not reach out to the narrator to exploit something that he can offer, and the same applies to the narrator when he accepts her offer of friendship. They pursue friendship for its own sake, which results in intimacy and connection.

“‘It’s like I’m struggling to keep things normal. Like, this is my normal. And if I don’t hold onto it, it’s like everything’s going to fall apart, for real.’

‘And cutting things makes you feel normal?’

‘Yeah. Like, when I’m cutting things, in my head, I keep telling myself: Okay, this is normal. And, in that moment, everything that’s wrong and everything that’s good, it kind of vanishes. It’s like that. Like normal’s coming right out of the scissors.’”

This passage helps characterize Kojima. As the novel reveals, one of Kojima’s strongest traits is her endurance. She manages to face her bullies with progressing levels of defiance, which gives off the impression that almost nothing can break her spirit. In this early passage, however, she reveals her vulnerability to the narrator by showing how she finds her secret ways to cope with the psychological effects of her harassment.

“On nights when I found myself inexplicably disturbed and unable to sleep, or when thoughts about my future or school depleted me, I turned toward my bookshelf, without getting up, and gazed at the spine of the slipcase holding all the notes. It held the words Kojima wrote for me. My eyes were seeing double, a little pair of rectangles casting a warm light at me through the darkness.”

Kojima’s friendship with the narrator has a profound impact on him, and he turns to her letters for comfort in times of emotional distress. This passage highlights two of the key symbols that the narrative uses to communicate the dynamics of their relationship: first, Kojima’s letters, which represent the warmth that she extends to the narrator; and second, the narrator’s eyes, which distort his vision because of his lazy eye, but end up magnifying the effect that Kojima’s letters have on him.

“Every painting was a moment of destruction coinciding with the birth of something wonderful. Each frame contained conflicting worlds. A crowd drawn into a sun spinning like a windmill. Fish washed ashore. A leery horse with eyes more human than anyone alive. A pale maiden.”

This passage describes the paintings the narrator sees when he visits the museum with Kojima. It foreshadows the conclusion of the novel by presenting the narrator with strange and surreal images. The first sentence, in particular, marries destruction with birth, hinting at the ways the contradictory qualities of these events result in a complex painting. This is precisely how the narrator reaches psychological and spiritual maturity at the end of the novel: He combines contradictory worldviews into a more complex mindset.

“‘When you feel like everything’s falling apart, or feel like things are too good to be true,’ I said, ‘when things get that way, you can cut my hair.’”

This is a key moment in the narrator’s character development. At the end of his visit to the art museum, Kojima experiences a moment of panic and is unable to wrestle back her feelings of being trapped by life. She candidly expresses her anxieties to the narrator. He responds with an act of kindness and generosity, recalling her confession about her cutting habit and offering his own hair as a way to help her cope with her anxiety. This act of generosity becomes a milestone in their relationship.

“There I was, at the start of summer, standing right in the middle of it, in the same place I had met up with Kojima that morning. I knew it was the same place, but it didn’t feel the same.”

The narrator’s friendship with Kojima has profoundly affected his life, and it has changed his impression of the world. The narrator comments on the way he has returned to the train station where his day began, but because of his experiences with Kojima that day—their visit to the museum, Kojima’s anxiety, and his offer to help her manage her panic attack—the same location feels renewed by a sense of warmth and hope.

“Without school, I could get by without seeing anyone or being seen by anyone. It was like being a piece of furniture in a room that nobody uses. I can’t express how safe it felt never being seen. I knew the peace could never last, but it was immensely comforting to know that, if I never left my room, no one in the world could lay a finger on me. The flip side was I had no way of engaging with the world, but that was how it had to be.”

In this passage, the narrator expresses his relief at escaping his school bullies while he is at home during the summer vacation. He compares himself to furniture that has been taken for granted, which expresses his desire to disappear. He believes his lazy eye makes him a target, and he yearns to be invisible. He says he prefers being invisible even if it brings isolation. This foreshadows the conclusion of the novel, when he has surgery to correct his lazy eye and therefore doesn’t draw attention to himself, but he is also alone.

“What could be more callous than using a suicide to make yourself feel better? Pretending to feel better wasn’t going to solve anything. Not if I was just pretending.”

The narrator challenges the notion that one way to reassure oneself over a bad situation is to think of how things could be worse. The narrator feels it is “callous” to use someone else’s misery—or, in this case, their death by suicide—to make himself feel better. This would be unfair to the person who has died since it would reduce their life and death into an instrument for personal joy.

“Sure, I was scared of Ninomiya, but what exactly made me scared? Was I afraid of getting hurt? If that was it, if that was what was haunting me, why couldn’t I stand up to him? What does it mean to be hurt? When they bullied me and beat me up, why couldn’t I do anything but obey them? What does it mean to obey? Why was I scared? Why? What does it mean to be scared? No matter how much I thought about it, I wasn’t going to find an answer.”

Part of the narrator’s characterization is his deeply reflective nature. While looking at himself in the mirror, he begins to examine his dynamic with Ninomiya and probe the reasons that bullying affects him the way that it does. He considers the possibility that it is illogical to be afraid of bullies, yet that doesn’t negate the reality of his fear. Despite his introspection, he acknowledges the limits of his own imagination, requiring him to further engage with the world to effectively reach the answers he is seeking.

“[I]t doesn’t really need to be a god, but if there’s nothing like that, then there are a whole lot of things that make no sense. Like money. My dad worked so hard, and not for his own sake. He did it for his family. But it didn’t matter how hard he worked. He still ended up living alone, and it’s not like he ever wanted to be rich or anything, but he’s so poor now he can’t buy himself new shoes, and my mom and I have gone on without him, living in luxury. How else could that happen? It’s so stupid, I can’t even begin to understand it. I have to believe there’s some kind of god, who sees everything that happens and understands the meaning of everything we’ve been through when everything is over.”

In this passage, Kojima makes an appeal for her philosophy that allows for the existence of an omniscient god. It is an important aspect of her worldview to believe that all suffering is resolved by some form of meaning. She cannot accept the chaos of a godless universe, since that would mean there is no meaning to be found in suffering or in living.

“They aren’t even thinking. Not at all. They’re just doing what they’ve seen other people do, following blindly. They don’t know what it means, or why they’re doing it. You and me, we’re just an outlet for them.”

Kojima observes that many of their classmates do not pursue bullying out of resentment or hatred for her and the narrator, but out of fear of being ostracized if they refuse to participate. She describes them as blind followers of popular bullies like Ninomiya, underscoring Peer Pressure Versus Self-Determination as a theme.

“I was only making myself dirty as a way of staying close to my dad, so I wouldn’t forget him. It was my own sign, a sign that I had been with him. Something that no one else can understand. A sign that my dad was out there somewhere, wearing the same old shoes, and that I was with him. Being dirty can mean something, too. But the other kids, they’ll never understand that.”

Kojima reveals that the reason she chooses to be messy is an act of solidarity with her father. It is difficult for her to explain this to her peers in class without incurring their ridicule, which places her in a social dilemma. She can either abandon her connection to her father or suffer the harassment of her peers. It is part of her characterization that she opts for the latter.

“Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else. Maybe it’s not as bad for me as it is for you, but I think I know how you feel, probably more than anybody.”

Kojima argues that her own suffering enables her to understand the narrator’s pain. Her argument hinges on her ability to compare and contrast his pain to her own, emphasizing the importance of Solidarity Versus Apathy as a theme. She also believes that their suffering makes them empathetic to all who suffer.

“Say I dropped out for a while, but somehow got my act together and finished my diploma and even college. It would probably seem like I was in the clear. But there was no guarantee I would be safe for good. None whatsoever. As long as I looked like I did, with this eye, I would always be a target. What if they were waiting, ready to ambush me wherever I went next? A hideous fate hiding down the road, waiting for me to pass.”

In this passage, the narrator reflects on the possibility of his suffering ending with his departure from middle school. As he imagines his distance from Ninomiya and the other bullies, he also imagines the possibility that other people like them exist everywhere in the world. He feels hopeless that his suffering may never end as long as he has a lazy eye that would always draw attention to him and make him a “target.”

“I don’t get novels. Reading about other people’s lives or whatever. Who cares? I mean, you have your own life, don’t you? You’d see it if you ever put the book down. Why go out of the way to get caught up in someone else’s made-up life? […] It’s just like magic. Not real magic. Bogus magic. What’s there to like? It’s a gimmick. A trick. In reality, nothing’s gonna change. No, maybe reading does change things. It makes them worse. Ruins your day. Anyway, it’s just a load of bull. If it’s not real magic, what’s the point? It’s just boring.”

Ninomiya does very well in school, but he expresses his disgust for the act of reading. He recognizes the magical experience that many claim to have while reading, but he also indicates that this magic is ephemeral and limited at best, robbing it of its power. It is in this way that he foreshadows Momose’s arguments about the meaninglessness of the world. This also shows that Ninomiya is incapable of feeling empathy for others’ suffering; he cannot identify with characters in books, finding them “boring.”

“‘That’s not why we let them do this,’ she said. ‘It’s not because we’re weak. We’re not just following orders or whatever. Maybe it began that way, I don’t know. But we’re not just obeying, not anymore. We’re letting it happen. We know exactly what’s going on. We see it, and we let it happen. I don’t think that’s weakness at all. It’s more like strength.’”

Kojima suggests that she and the narrator allow themselves to be bullied, not because they cannot overpower their bullies, but because it is a sign of their strength to endure abuse and survive it. This is connected to the theme of Peer Pressure Versus Self-Determination because it demonstrates Kojima’s ability to subvert the psychological effect of bullying and thus resist the pressure of the bullies’ efforts against them. In this way, she robs power from the bullies by turning being bullied into a choice that she makes.

“‘I really like your eyes,’ Kojima said. ‘I said it before, but they’re a sign. They matter. Your eyes are who you are.’”

Throughout the novel, Kojima affirms the narrator’s lazy eye as a positive attribute. This reframes the narrator’s perspective of how others perceive his eye since he has always viewed it as an “abnormality.” In this passage, Kojima takes her statement to a new level, indicating that it is the essential quality that defines the narrator’s identity. This introduces a dilemma for the narrator as he contemplates treating his eye, which would disappoint Kojima.

“I thought about how nice it would be if I could tell her everything, or better yet, say nothing, and stay in this room forever. But I couldn’t stay. Kojima needed me, and I needed her. It’s not like we were ever really together at school, but I could remember countless times where it had helped me just to see her from behind and know that she was there. And on the off-chance that it helped Kojima in the same way to have me there, I couldn’t just leave her alone in the classroom.”

At several points during the novel, the narrator contemplates the possibility of either dropping out or asking to be pulled out of his school. Though this would certainly resolve his issues with the bullies, he comes to realize that he would be abandoning Kojima to suffer alone. It is a sign of how much their friendship impacts him that Kojima is his reason to stay; it even supersedes his fear of being bullied.

“What is dying anyway? I let this impossible question fill the darkness of my bedroom. I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any given moment. This isn’t a fable or a joke or an abstract idea. People are always dying. It’s a perfect truth. No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive?”

In this passage, the narrator explores death as an end to all suffering. Although this invites intrusive thoughts and leads to him contemplating his own death by suicide, he comes to realize the normalcy of death. The very ordinariness of death leads him to think that his own life is smaller in significance than he feels it is. He begins to consider that just as his death might have no meaning, neither does his life.

“For people to actually live by some golden rule, we’d have to be living in a world with no contradictions. But we don’t live in a world like that. No one does. People do what works for them, whatever makes them feel good. But because nobody likes getting stepped on, people start spouting crap about being good to others, being considerate, whatever. Tell me I’m wrong. Everyone does things they don’t want people doing back. Predators eat prey, and school serves no real purpose other than separating the kids who have what it takes from the ones who don’t. That’s the whole point. Everywhere you look, the strong walk all over the weak. Even those fools who think they’ve found the answers by coming up with perfect little sayings about how the world ought to be can’t escape it. Because the real world is everywhere.”

This passage represents a crucial juncture in Momose’s discourse on meaninglessness and chaos. After Momose has argued against the narrator’s pleas to stop bullying him, he levies an argument against the popular moral concept of the golden rule, which expects people to treat others the way they would like to be treated. Momose says that this doesn’t matter because nothing can stop people from contradicting one another, which means that contradiction and willpower are the dominant forces of the world, not goodness, ethics, or morality.

“Even if something happens to us, even if we die and never have to deal with them again, the same thing will happen to someone, somewhere. The same thing. The weak always go through this, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because the strong never go away. That’s why you want to pretend to be like them, isn’t it? You want to join them. You really don’t get it. You’re being tested. Overcoming this is all that matters.”

After the narrator confronts Momose, he goes to Kojima and communicates his desire to undergo corrective surgery for his lazy eye. Though he never directly raises his concerns over Momose’s discourse, his decision is motivated by Momose’s philosophy, which Kojima is implicitly criticizing in this passage. She implores the narrator not to succumb to a worldview that sacrifices his weakness for the sake of so-called normalcy, indicating that the temptation to succumb to it is merely a test of his strength of character.

“If anything has meaning, everything does. And if nothing has meaning, nothing does. That’s what I was saying. It’s all the same. You, me, we’re all free to interpret the world however we want. We see the world differently. It’s that simple. That’s why you need to be strong. You have to overpower people so they can’t come at you with their thoughts or rules or values. […] Events always have meaning, Kojima said. There’s meaning in overcoming pain and suffering.”

In this passage, the narrator understands that Kojima’s and Momose’s differing philosophies merge into a more complex worldview. His personal philosophy is no longer built on a black-and-white reliance on blanket truths; rather, it leverages the contradictions of the real world so he can assert himself as someone who believes that suffering has meaning.