MS Ice Sandwich - Paperback

by Mieko Kawakami (Author), Louise Heal Kawai (Translator)

A witty, moving story of adolescent love and loss from the acclaimed, prize-winning author of Breasts and Eggs

"Haruki Murakami listed Kawakami as his favourite young writer, so you're going to want to snatch up this lovely coming-of-age story about a boy who becomes obsessed with a woman who sells sandwiches" -- Bustle

In her English language debut, "ceaselessly growing and evolving"novelist Mieko Kawakami renders an adolsecent voice with laser precision (Haruki Murakami).

"Ms Ice Sandwich" is a name I made up, of course. I thought of it the minute I first saw 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.

A young boy returns obsessively to a supermarket sandwich counter, entranced by the beauty of the woman who works there. Her aloof demeanour and electric blue eyelids make him feel the most intense joy he's ever known. He calls her Ms Ice Sandwich, and he wants nothing more than to spend his days watching her coolly slip sandwiches into bags.

But the complexities of life keep getting in the way - his beloved grandmother's illness is only getting worse, and his mother seems to be totally ignoring it. There's also his faltering friendship with his classmate Tutti. As she invites him to join her in thrilling games and fantasy, the boy begins to enter a whole new world of imagination.

Wry, intimate and wonderfully skewed, Ms Ice Sandwich is a poignant depiction of the naivety and wisdom of youth, just as it is passing.

Author Biography

Mieko Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976. Her first break was as a singer, making her major-label debut in 2002 and going on to release three albums. Eventually she branched out into writing, first submitting poems to literary magazines and then winning the Akutagawa Prize in 2008. In 2010 she received the MEXT Award for New Artists and the Murasaki Shikibu Literary Prize for her first full-length novel Heaven. She is the author of the novel Breasts and Eggs.

Originally from Manchester, UK, Louise Heal Kawai has lived in Japan for about 25 years and been a translator of Japanese literature for the past 10. Her translations include the bestselling memoir Yakuza Moon by Shoko Tendo, the ground-breaking feminist Taeko Tomioka novel Building Waves, and A Quiet Place by the mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto. Ms Ice Sandwich is her second Mieko Kawakami translation.