Ms Ice Sandwich: Mieko Kawakami (Japanese Novellas)

Product Information

The translation here is certainly deserving of endless praise as well with the voice coming through so clear and fluid. No, not because the author is Japanese, but because the main character and the whole novel carry a ‘Ghibli’ feeling of hope with it that I absolutely loved. Through the economic prose we can sympathise with the boy and partake in his naïve worldview easily.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve read anything by Mieko Kawakami, and what you’re reading or would recommend reading for the Japanese Literature Challenge. Both the central boy and Tutti’s loneliness can be prescribed to a lack of parental care or involvement, their lives dominated not by their children or their duties as adults, but rather by the excesses of medias such as television and smartphones. A hopeful message which validates the talent of the author and makes it a good introduction to Kawakami Mieko’s universe. When he descibes the lady, he places specific emphasis on the beautiful characteristics of her face and her "ice-blue eyelids" which earned her the nickname Ms Ice Sandwich. I have no doubt in my mind, their interest in reading would be heightened by the fact this story focuses on important questions about love, life, death, memories, and regret.

The cookie is set by Facebook to show relevant advertisments to the users and measure and improve the advertisements. She has invited the boy to join them one evening to share a favourite film although a date has yet to be agreed. The underlying sense of transience harkens back to classical Japanese literature, to be sure, but this is no derivative work resting on the laurels of past greats. I thought Kawakami was going to lean towards a conventional pattern of childhood love/‘romance’ and was happily surprised when she doesn’t.

He saves his money that he may purchase the products she sells and thereby get close enough to speak. As someone with more guy pals than gal pals, I always appreciate novels with stories without a ‘forced’ romantic subplot between the main characters of different gender/sex. He doesn’t admit that it’s because of what people are saying, but it seems likely that he was influenced by them. It might have been very brief and left me yearning for more, but I developed an instant liking to her quirky yet utterly captivating writing style.In one of Kawakami’s interviews available on YT, here , she was asked about her thoughts on female sexuality which I found quite complementary to the theme of adolescent ‘love’ in ‘Ms Ice Sandwich’.

Besides the novels on this list, has published many short stories in online magazines and journals, play scripts and the odd poem.

Kawakami’s writing never seems to give the readers enough to properly ‘evaluate’ the situation/events. The writing in this book is really childish, but again the narrator is fourth grader, so it just works fine. But life keeps getting in the way - there's his beloved grandmother's illness, and a faltering friendship with his classmate Tutti, who she invites him into her private world.

Ever since the publication of Breasts and Eggs Meiko Kawakami’s has become more popular but before the English translation of that novel, indie press, Pushkin quietly released this novella way pre-Kawakami mania. And she goes on to talk about how even as a grown woman, there are certain moments, during the half-conscious moments of waking up from a deep sleep – in a sort of peaceful haze – that she almost forgets that she’s a ‘woman’.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.