In Meiko Kawakami’s novel Heaven, there is a scene where the unnamed 14-year-old narrator gets his hands tied behind his back and his head forced inside a torn-open volleyball so that six bullies can play “human soccer” with him in the gym. Panic consumes the child as “a tepid lava, black and leaden, rose over my ankles and climbed my legs. It probed my mouth and pumped into my lungs. In no time, it was melting me, working from the inside.” The episode is exquisite but almost viscerally difficult to read, which can be said about much of the book’s vital look at the brutality of bullying and other challenges faced by young Japanese students.
Kawakami’s contemporary Eto Mori develops similar themes in her novel Colorful, which looks at the life of another despondent 14-year-old, one so despairing that he has committed suicide at the novel’s outset. But where Kawakami’s novel can be graphic and disquieting, Mori “chose to write about a serious subject with a comical touch … to depict it lightly,” as she says in the afterword. Mori has spent most of her career writing acclaimed books for children and young adults, but with Colorful, published in Japan 20 years ago and appearing only now in English in a translation by Jocelyen Allen, she tries to straddle a line appealing to adults both young and old. Such delineations are largely artificial and arbitrary, dependent upon specific readers, but they are relevant given the new U.S. audience and Mori’s stated intention that her novel also “allow[s] young people who are tired of living to have a break from their own lives … And then, when they [close] the book at the end, I [want] the weight on their hearts to be just a little lighter.”
Mori’s premise is straightforward: A recently deceased soul who “committed a grave error” before its death, thereby eliminating any chance of rebirth, wins a heavenly lottery granting it a second chance. The soul will be given a homestay — a one-year residency in the borrowed body of someone still on earth — and if they realize “how big [their] mistake had been,” they will be reborn.
Our unnamed narrator’s soul is thus placed in the body of 14-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, a ninth-grader who committed suicide and was pronounced dead 10 minutes earlier. Miraculously revived — as his parents and doctors believe — and back at home, the new Makoto thinks his situation is not too shabby, but Prapura — the suit-wearing, parasol-toting angel guiding the soul’s do-over — disabuses him of such ideas, reminding him that Makoto was so miserable that he killed himself. Prapura says the mother was having an affair with her flamenco teacher, the father was selfish and working for unscrupulous criminals, and the brother was a bully. He tells him that Makoto saw his first love, eighth-grader Hiroka Kuwabara, going into a love hotel with a man old enough to be her father.
Armed with this information, the new Makoto spurns the family’s many efforts to interact with him, going so far as to hurt the mother by throwing her affair in her face. His classmates are unaware of his suicide attempt (and its success), so he takes refuge in the only place where he can be himself, the school’s art club, where he comes across one of Makoto’s unfinished paintings. He also tries to connect with Hiroka, even trailing her to the love hotel one night and dragging her away to a doughnut shop. There she tells Makoto that she likes having sex with her lover, though she started doing it for the money because she is materialistic and “once I’m an old lady, my body’ll be worthless.” (Remember, she is in eighth grade.) Hiroka takes pity on Makoto and offers to have sex with him, too, for 20,000 yen (about $180), but he turns her down.
Makoto gets no pity from Shoko Sano, however, an art club habitué who the old Makoto had never noticed. Shoko is somehow aware of the fact that Makoto is different now, though he denies it when she confronts him. Undaunted she visits him at home to try and comfort him after he gets beaten up and robbed in a park:
“‘The Makoto Kobayashi I know always gazed into the depths.’ Shoko smiled, dreamily. ‘While all the other boys yell and play like children, Kobayashi’s off to one side, quietly focused on the deepest parts of the world. Even in the middle of the noisy classroom or out on the dusty playing field, his eyes alone pick up all those things that no one else notices. You can tell the second you look at his canvases. Don’t you remember him? That’s the kind of boy Makoto Kobayashi was. A boy who was pure and clear, kilometers away from all the other nasty, childish, rude boys. He took in the sadness of this world and suffered under the weight of it.'”
Makoto pushes back, believing that he knows his borrowed body better after a few months, and insists that “Makoto Kobayashi’s always been a regular guy … just an average teenager.”
On a fishing trip with the father, Makoto starts to realize that his impressions about this family — and hence the reality presented to him by Prapura — might be misguided.
The idea of the Kobayashi family I’d had in my head gradually began to change color. It wasn’t some simple change, like things that I thought were black were actually white. It was more like when I looked closely, things I thought were a single, uniform color were really made up of a bunch of different colors. That’s maybe the best way to describe it. Where there was black, there was also white. Red and blue and yellow. Bright colors, dark colors. Beautiful ones and plain ones. Depending on how you looked at it, you could see pretty much every color in there.
This metaphor of a colorful life being good and a life without color being bad is hammered home repeatedly and, at times, awkwardly, as when Hiroka has a total breakdown crying out that she’s “so weird” and “all messed up” and Makoto tells her that “Everyone’s like that … Everyone’s got their own box of paints, and some of the colors are pretty and some are ugly.”
Makoto faces an unexpected race-against-the-clock at the end, though given the novel’s lighthearted tone, the outcome is never really in doubt. More homilies about life being colorful and the dawning realization that most of Makoto’s problems resulted from misunderstandings are comforting, but also feel a bit naïve given the literal life-and-death stakes. Kawakami’s Heaven also has a tidy resolution that, while disorienting, acts as a kind of balm after the battering delivered by the rest of the story. Mori’s approach requires no such corrective, however.
Prapura lobs a few subtle broadsides at our reality that would likely escape teens, such as when he tells Makoto that “No one’s really fussing over the details in this world,” but overall Colorful feels more oriented toward young audiences. Makoto is pressured to get into high school, which in Japan requires passing intensive exams, as well as whether or not he should try to attend a pricey private school, which would allow him to focus on art but would financially tax his parents. In her afterword, Mori also mentions how Japanese students deal with “classroom hierarchi … the excessive meddling or outright neglect of their parents … Bullying. Dropping out. Suicide,” all of which she touches on in Colorful.
Japanese audiences were receptive to the book — over a million copies have been sold in Japan, and Mori’s afterword tells us about the girl who reached out to say she stopped thinking about suicide after reading Colorful. Maybe I’m too cynical — but I’ll wait to see if this novel can persuade American teens that life in 2021 isn’t so bad.
[Published by Counterpoint on July 20, 2021, 224 pages, $16.95 paperback]