While I felt that the author could have expanded a lot more on this issue rather than just leaving it as a side-issue, perhaps nothing more was needed to be said. For starters, he lives with his Grandma who was once a large part of his life but now is squeezing out the last ounces of life mostly asleep in her chair.

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.About a half-dozen are available in English, and her best-known ones in English are Breasts and Eggs and Heaven. The only song that comes to mind when I was reading Kawakami's novella is Yonezu Kenshi’s ‘Gray and Blue’/ Haiiro to Ao’ which shares the same theme of friendship and love. When his friend Tutti realises how much he likes Ms Ice Sandwich, though, she encourages him to go there and talk to her. He goes as far as to insist that if you’re really thinking of making the other person feel good/happy, then it’s not really a romantic infatuation. To "fall in love" is fundamentally lonely, thinking things like "What can I do to get closer to them?

And when that happens, I'm going to tell myself I can't give in or freeze up and get discouraged and do nothing. It’s interesting to me when a novel focuses on societal pressures, against our internal ones, and the Japanese authors tend to do such an excellent job of writing about the conflict. I wish I’d read this one before I read her other books; I might have been able to appreciate her other ones more if I had started with this wonderful novella.If anything, it effectively conveys our narrator's feelings (his crush on Ms Ice Sandwich, his sadness over his grandmother) and youth. From pocket money to school lunch to his mother embezzling funds from her bedridden mother-in-law to farts, his mind leaps hither and yon.