Name: あこがれ
ISBN: 9784103256243

川上未映子

みんな、いつか遠くへ行ってしまう。本当の自分を知っているのにね。生きること、いなくなること、強くなること―人生のとても柔らかな場所をそっと照らしだす物語。いちばん大切な人に贈りたい、四年ぶりの長篇小説。

あこがれ

Emma Nash

Mieko Kawakami is really something else—a former singer-songwriter and blogger whose literary efforts have won both Japan's most prestigious awards and effusive praise from one Haruki Murakami. Given her reputation as a philosophical, Akutagawa Prize-winning experimentalist, I was not expecting this book—a coming-of-age story (two coming-of-age stories?) shared between two friends, a preteen boy and girl—to be so funny and accessible! Kawakami's narrators are kids, and they mostly think and talk like kids. Thankfully, there's very little forced tweeness here; the voices of Kawakami's child narrators are rarely cloying or contrived, and the story itself is gentle stuff.

The plot is as follows: In the first story, "Miss Ice-Cream Sandwich," Mugi describes his crush on a strange-looking woman who sells ice-cream sandwiches at the local shopping center. Over the course of the story, he learns that other people in town see her differently and also copes with loss. In the second story, Mugi's friend Hegati (Tutti in the English translation—her nickname is some kind of pun on how her farts smell, which I don't really get in Japanese) learns that her widower father was once married to a woman other than her mom. She also works on a middle-school yearbook. Various other things happen, and in one of the stories, the characters watch the movie Heat.
 
Only the first half of this book has been translated into English (under the title Ms Ice Sandwich), which is kind of a shame, because I was slightly more taken with the more conflict-heavy second. That said, I'd still check out the translation, because reading this book made me happy-sad.