Mieko Kawakami is one of my favourite authors, at least regarding works from the twenty-first century. All of her works have scored four stars and above here on The Steady Read, which should indicate my fondness for her writing style and handling of stories. However, as this introduction (and the rating above) may allude to, Ms Ice Sandwich was a let-down compared to the rest of her releases. This is a shame, because Kawakami excels with shorter stories.
This fairly short novella follows a Japanese fourth grader as he copes with his obsessive fascination with a woman who sells sandwiches in his local supermarket. He is particularly enamoured by the uniqueness of her face, and the ‘electric blue’ eye shadow she wears. With no name to give her, this nine- or ten-year-old boy simply dubs her ‘Ms Ice Sandwich’.
In addition to that, Kawakami also builds a small world around our narrator, portraying a slow-moving and uneventful town. His family life is also problematic; a dead father, a spiritually obsessed mother, and a borderline vegetative grandmother who is bed bound. All in all, he only feels that he can rely on his small handful of friends, such as an energetic girl nicknamed Tutti, in addition to his gravitation towards the sandwich seller at the supermarket.
The narration style, for better or worse, is riddled with personality. Our narrator’s thoughts are often sporadic, and his way of speaking is mostly unrefined and unsophisticated. It captures the tangential and rambling nature of fourth grade children, which is a good display of Kawakami’s ability to bake personality into the way a narration flows or how a character talks.
His obsessive nature will probably be something a lot of us can empathise with, as children generally get fixated on silly or unimportant things for long periods of time. So, again, points for accuracy.
However, I can’t help but admit that the narration style can grow irritating, in addition to the strange emphasis on flatulent humour. The novella and its characters are simplistic and immature by design, because that’s typically how children are, or how they view the world: in a simple, immature way. Yet, even with this knowledge, it doesn’t make the narration any more enjoyable. It is basically as bothersome or ramble-prone as attempting to have a conversation with a real-world child.
This next part comes with a minor spoiler warning, because it’s hard to critique it without giving something away. If you want to avoid it, jump to the penultimate paragraph. You have been warned.
In a general sense, this novella is very flat, and its world is small. Characters have next to no real background or mystique, and it makes it harder to grow interested in them. The title character, Ms Ice Sandwich herself, is extraordinarily flat and uninteresting. The story continually builds up to the scene of our narrator talking to Ms Ice Sandwich, of achieving his goal of communicating with her, and Kawakami pulls the rug out from below us in one of the most anticlimactic scenes ever. I don’t want to spoil it all, but let’s just say our narrator’s very minor chance at involving himself in Ms Ice Sandwich’s life was reduced to zero.
Don’t take me for a fool, I know this is the exact intention of the scene. It’s supposed to be a funny slap in the face, and it will remind a lot of us about our primary school crushes that didn’t work out, or something else from our youth that immediately backfired or did not according to plan.
In retrospect, it is an amusing way to lead into the story’s conclusion, but it comes more at the reader’s expense than anything. It is not cute, nor is it particularly meaningful. The only real lesson that can be extracted from it is the indication that life is not fair and we should often expect to get our hopes shattered (something most readers in, or beyond, their teens already know).
I suspect this melancholic and blunt message was the intention, as Kawakami tends to incorporate sad or anticlimactic endings into her works—but a story this short really suffers due to a lack of other core elements. With little else to bolster this novella, everything hung on how the story would blossom once these two characters interact.
I want to stress that it is not a bad book, but simply one that did not live up to my expectations from this particular author. It does possess some quirkiness and black humour; decently-written and generally on-par with the author’s other works. One-sided loves are always going to be awkward to write, and even harder to make convincing, and I think Kawakami successfully captured the naïve and childlike feelings of a boy in love using her narration. This element upheld the writing and is likely to stir some empathy within readers.
But none of this changes the fact that I was rather miffed after closing it over. All of Kawakami’s other works have left me thinking about them for hours or days afterwards, picking apart small messages within the story, or thinking about the unknown fate of a character post-story. This one didn’t, at least not really.
I simply came away with nothing of substance to ponder or think about, worsened back a minimal attachment to the novella’s characters. At best, one could wonder what the narrator will grow up to be like, or how he and Tutti’s friendship will grow and carry on, but we have no real clues about any of that. Once the story ends, it is effectively a blank slate with no real guidance from Kawakami, which is always the sign of a middling conclusion. Readers need more to linger on!
So, mixed feelings, but still more positive than negative. If you enjoy Kawakami’s other works, then it is worth checking out Ms Ice Sandwich. However, if you want to skip on it due to its shorter length and (as stated by this review) lesser quality, it won’t be a huge loss to your reading list.
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