“Ms Ice Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick layer of a kind of electric blue, exactly the same colour as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting in our freezer since last summer.”
This 92-page novella is a masterpiece of voice, narrated by a young boy infatuated with a girl who works on the sandwich counter in his local supermarket. In this charming story, Kawakami conjures the vocabulary and grammar of a child, a skill that’s rare in much contemporary fiction.
Queuing to buy his egg sandwich, the boy is extremely nervous. “Then when she finally takes my money and gives me the change and her eyelids turn upwards and I can see those great big eyes again, without any warning that squishy, yellowy, orangey stuff inside my head becomes extra bright, then that hollow place right under my chin, above my collarbone, feels like it’s being squeezed really tightly. It’s like that feeling you get when you swallow rice without chewing it properly first.”
The simplicity of the language, with all its endearing innocence, makes the book a deceptively easy read. Beneath the child-like sentences are all of life’s joys and hardships, from first love to parental grief to the confusions of friendship.
Kawakami’s coming-of-age novella is a love story but it’s also a child’s-eye-view of grief. What amazed me about this story was how the author made me feel different emotions at the same time. From the strange joys of shared grief to the agonies of love, it’s all there in the simple tale of one boy’s life.
First published in Japanese in Shincho, 2013, and in the novel Akogare, 2014. Published in English by Pushkin Press, 2017
A Personal Anthology 