I’ve noticed how so many of the contemporary Japanese
stories have a diaristic-feel to them. Sure – there are plots (sometimes very
grave and outlandish ones), there are characters you love or abhor, settings
that draw you in, details and contexts that set up the foundation for your flight
of fancy so essential in fiction – but there is the quiet feeling I get of not really
being important or necessary to the equation. The writer would have written
about this world and that person, would have rhapsodized about this season or
mulled over this sorrow, whether I (the reader) was there or not.
MS Ice Sandwich is a lot like that but it is written with
such measured grace that you know that it was written for a reader.
The novella is narrated by a young boy (unnamed in the
story). He lives with his mother and grandmother (dad’s mom). His father died
when he was only four years old. Mum runs a salon and also does some divination
enterprise off and on. Granny is unwell and lays sleeping in a room. But our
narrator is very fond of her. His school friends include a young girl, Tutti, who
whops him on the head whenever she sees a crow. (The rules of the ‘game’ are
that you can bop the head of the person in front of you when you see a crow. It
so happens that this little girl always does this when she sees our narrator.)
One day, at the supermarket, our boy sees a young woman
selling sandwiches and is captivated. She looks unusual and wears dramatic blue
eye shadow. Something about her face is not quite symmetrical but she is so
calm and confident as if she deserves to be regarded as the stunning cool goddess
she imagines herself to be. This is the boy’s reading of her. (“Ms Ice
Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick layer of a kind of electric
blue, exactly the same colour as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting
in our freezer since last summer. There’s one more awesome thing about her – if
you watch when she looks down, there’s a sharp dark line above her eyes, as if
when she closed her eyes, someone started to draw on two extra eyes with a
felt-tip pen but stopped halfway.” Elsewhere in the book, as the boy
mentally serenades Ms Ice Sandwich for actually packing an egg sandwich with
perfect, ballet-like motions, we get another description of her. Ms Ice
Sandwich has really short hair, her head looks just like an onigiri rice ball
with a sheet of nori wrapped tightly around it.”)
The boy is smitten. Her peaceful anchorage in a sense of self
seems to contrast with our young narrator’s jumbled adolescent identity. (There’s
a description of how he feels when he’s looking at Ms Ice Sandwich: “I’ve
never seen the middle of the ocean or the edge of the sky, but maybe the kind
of breeze that blows in those places now comes blowing in out of nowhere and I
feel it wrapped around me.”)
Then one day, the boy encounters a fight between a patron
and Ms Ice Sandwich where the patron calls her ugly, smug, and accuses her of ‘doing
something to her face’. The boy is young and does not really know about plastic
surgery or the like. The patron then storms off after yelling that Ms Ice
Sandwich will never get married.
Then it so happens that the boy stops going to the store and
later he finds out that Ms Ice Sandwich has left working there.
It’s not a big story. It’s not even a particularly deep one.
But it is so gentle and caring – like someone turning you down with kindness.
There’s a part in the book where this boy (who counts his steps to go to the
store to see Ms Ice, now has to come home straight from school skipping his
store visit). He sits and sketches Ms Ice Sandwich on the kotatsu table
in his grandmum’s room and tells her about his love, even though she is
sleeping. Sometimes he looks up and wonders about her grandmother’s mortality.
He observes the hierarchy of the fifth and sixth graders in school. He listens
to his mum as she explains the ‘spirit levels’ of human beings. We meet him and
Tutti on a movie night at her place where she introduces our boy to Hollywood
through the movie ‘Heat’. He tells Tutti and Ms Ice and how besotted he is with
her. He doesn’t understand the catch in Tutti’s throat when she later says ‘goodbye’.
Only we know that someone’s heart is just a little bit broken.
We see a young boy in an ordinary world trying to make sense
of it through the central pivot of an extraordinary character he has
encountered – one with blue eye shadow.
The book is not tragic but it does leave you with some wistfulness.
With all kind of understanding, there is a bit of trade-off of innocence.
It’s like that line in a series called ‘Wonder Years’, where
the protagonist – also a young boy – ends an episode with this line, “We don’t
blame each other for getting older. We forgive ourselves for growing up.”
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