Heaven

by Mieko Kawakami

“I don’t really know how to say it, but it’s like something’s wrong, all the time, and I can’t do anything to stop it. It’s always there. When I’m at home, when I’m at school. But things can be good sometimes. Really good. Like when I’m talking to you or writing letters. Those things are really good for me. Then I start feeling like everything’s okay. And that makes me happy. But know what? That feeling like everything’s wrong and this feeling like everything’s okay, I guess a part of me wants to believe that neither one of them is, like, natural . . . I guess I want to feel like they’re both exceptions to the rule. I mean, I almost never feel like everything’s okay, but just because most of my life feels wrong doesn’t mean that’s how I want it to be. There’s a part of me that doesn’t feel like anything is wrong or okay. Just normal. That’s the part of me I like, the normal part.”

“We’ll understand some things while we’re alive and some after we die. But it doesn’t really matter when it happens. What matters is that all the pain and all the sadness have meaning.”

“But it isn’t meaningless. When it’s all over, we’ll reach a place, somewhere or something we could never reach without having gone through everything we’ve gone through. Know what I mean?”

I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any given moment. This isn’t a fable or a joke or an abstract idea. People are always dying. It’s a perfect truth. No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive? I made myself crazy, tossing and turning, hyperventilating. Then it hit me: dying is just like sleeping. You only know you’re sleeping when you wake up the next day, but if morning never comes, you sleep forever. That must be what death is like. When someone dies, they don’t even know they’re dead. Because they never see it happen, nobody ever really dies. This hit me like a sucker punch.

“Hear me out, though. There’s no beautiful world where everyone thinks the same way and they all understand each other perfectly. It doesn’t exist. You think it does, but it’s not real. When you really look at what’s going on, everyone’s living in their own world. They come into contact . . .”

“For people to actually live by some golden rule, we’d have to be living in a world with no contradictions. But we don’t live in a world like that. No one does. People do what works for them, whatever makes them feel good. But because nobody likes getting stepped on, people start spouting crap about being good to others, being considerate, whatever. Tell me I’m wrong. Everyone does things they don’t want people doing back. Predators eat prey, and school serves no real purpose other than separating the kids who have what it takes from the ones who don’t. That’s the whole point. Everywhere you look, the strong walk all over the weak. Even those fools who think they’ve found the answers by coming up with perfect little sayings about how the world ought to be can’t escape it. Because the real world is everywhere.”

“Listen, if there’s a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there. This is it. None of that matters. And you know what? I think that’s fucking great.”