Ms Ice Sandwich: Mieko Kawakami (Japanese Novellas)

Product Information

The narrator has a bit of a crisis here, hurt, offended and unsure what to feel when discovering that something and someone he cherished for beauty is seen as so offensive to others all the while lacking the emotional linguistics to make a healthy assessment of it. Ms Ice Sandwich, by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Louise Heal Kawai), is a short novel about a young boy’s infatuation with a woman he observes working behind the sandwich counter at a busy supermarket.

This allows for a charming story that’s easy to read thanks to the superb translation by Louise Heal Kawai. The casual tone of his narration, which often emphasised his age and naïveté, made his voice all the more authentic. A short story about a Japanese boy who has an infatuation with the sandwich lady at the local supermarket.

Kawakami tells the story from the little boy's point of view, and she does a fantastic job depicting how he is trying to make sense of his feelings and explain his actions.

This is always a risky undertaking as sounding false will spoil the book no matter how good the plot is and trying to capture an adolescent train of thought is as elusive as trying to follow a story a child of that age tries to tell you (I have a ten year old, trust me). If you are looking for a quick and uplifting tale of first love you should definitely consider giving Ms Ice Sandwich a try. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Ultimately, he must learn that image and looks are not what make a person and this is his first foray into the cruel and unjust standards enforced in a patriarchial society. As I find often with Japanese literature, the pace and character of the book feels very different from western literature: it has a kind of indefinite feeling to it, like the question: "yes, but what is the point?