47 pages • 1-hour read
Heaven: A Novel
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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
The narrator and his stepmother attend the funeral of his step-aunt, which is the first time he has ever gone to a funeral. He forces himself to look at his dead step-aunt so that he can tell what sets dead bodies apart from living ones. The narrator and his stepmother leave the funeral early, and his stepmother suggests that they get salt to purify their apartment. She later observes how weird that day has been.
The next time the narrator goes to school, he discovers that his desk has been stuffed with trash. Before he can clean the mess up, Ninomiya comes in and taunts him for trying to kill everyone with the unpleasant smell. Ninomiya then threatens the narrator, telling him he would like to play a game with him after school. The narrator spends most of the class figuring out how he can convince his stepmother to let him get out of school, but he realizes that it won’t matter because his lazy eye will continue to affect him for the rest of his life. When school is dismissed, he tries to evade Ninomiya, but then he bumps into Kojima. As he tries to explain why he hasn’t replied to her last letter, he is kicked down by Ninomiya and his friends.
The bullies, including Momose, take the narrator to the school gym. They put a punctured volleyball on the narrator’s head—they want to play soccer, using the narrator as the soccer ball. Ninomiya taunts the narrator about his love for reading. Then, the boys take turns kicking the narrator as they play their game. Eventually, the narrator collapses and Ninomiya stops the game, seeing how much blood the narrator has lost from his injuries. The bullies tell the narrator to clean up and leave discreetly, and they say he must not tell anyone what they did.
On the floor of the gym, the narrator experiences himself leaving his own body. Then, Kojima enters the gym to help him. While helping him wash up, she tells him that the bullies do the same types of things to her, too. Kojima tries to convince the narrator to leave school through the front gate and go to a hospital, but he decides to exit by climbing over the back wall of the school so no one will see him. Before the narrator leaves, Kojima suggests that they should try fighting back; she is provoked after seeing how the bullies have treated the narrator. Though she is crying, she tells the narrator she isn’t sad. She argues that the bullies are scared of the narrator’s eyes because they can’t understand what it’s like to have them. She adds that allowing themselves to be bullied will only make the bullies more afraid of them, and she reaffirms how much she likes the narrator’s eyes.
The narrator tells his stepmother that he was hit by a bike, and he struggles to sleep through the pain. He goes to school the following day, remembering everything that Kojima had told him about finding meaning in their suffering. He finds it difficult, however, to feel the relief that normally comes to him whenever he interacts with her. During homeroom, the narrator’s teacher asks what happened to him. The narrator gives the same excuse he gave his stepmother, and the teacher encourages him to see the nurse. After school, the narrator goes to the hospital, where the doctor orders an x-ray. The doctor prescribes medication for pain relief before asking the narrator to come back in a week.
Chapter 6 Summary
Kojima asks to meet with the narrator, but the narrator declines, not wanting to see her. Recovering from his injuries is a struggle, and the narrator finds it very difficult to engage with anyone at home and school. His stepmother encourages him to see the doctor again, but a month goes by and the narrator gradually develops insomnia. He thinks about dying by suicide, equating it with a desire to vanish from the world. He also imagines how his peers would react to his death, as well as the repercussions it would have on Ninomiya and his friends. He then realizes that most likely, nothing will change as a consequence of his death.
Kojima continues to write to the narrator, but the narrator refuses to respond. He finds little relief in his warm memories of their time together. He notices, however, that Kojima seems more defiant as she suffers her bullies’ continued torments.
When the narrator finally returns to the hospital, he sees Momose there. The narrator hides from Momose at first, but he then decides to sit beside him in the waiting area. Momose doesn’t mind and the two of them sit quietly until Momose leaves. The narrator follows him outside and eventually grabs Momose to get his attention. He tells Momose that his insomnia has been caused by the beating he endured at the hands of the bullies. He stands up for himself, demanding that Momose stop bullying him because of his lazy eye. Momose argues back, explaining that the reason they bully him has nothing to do with his eyes. Momose says that the narrator is a convenient outlet for the bullies’ violent urges; the fact that he has a lazy eye is merely a coincidence. Nothing about Momose’s outlook on bullying suggests any regard for good or evil. The narrator rebuts that the bullies still try to hide their actions from parents and teachers. Momose replies that it doesn’t matter and the narrator is free to believe what he wants, just as the bullies do. Furthermore, Momose says that it is moot to think that any two people can be convinced to believe in the same value system. The narrator’s only option, Momose suggests, is to act against the bullies, regardless of how anyone will feel.
The narrator asks Momose how he would react if the narrator died by suicide. Momose reaffirms his philosophy by answering he wouldn’t feel guilt. The narrator gets Momose to admit that he would feel differently if the same thing happened to his sister, whom he loves. Momose replies by pointing to the way people feel no guilt around pornography, even if the people involved in making pornography have their own loved ones. In the real world, he explains, contradiction trumps moral consistency. He suggests: “[I]f there’s a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there” (120). The narrator turns his question around by asking how Momose would feel if the narrator tried to kill him. Momose challenges him to try. He says that the narrator ultimately can’t do it because of his guilt; he says that only guilt differentiates the narrator from his bullies.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Kojima believes that her and the narrator’s vulnerability and suffering are what defines and distinguishes them from callous and cruel people, underlining the importance of Peer Pressure Versus Self-Determination. She believes that while most of their bullies unthinkingly follow the herd, she and the narrator are empathetic and thoughtful. For most of the novel, the narrator has held on to Kojima’s worldview to make sense of his continued suffering. However, as the narrator’s suffering escalates, culminating in being severely beaten up by Ninomiya and the other bullies, he comes to quietly doubt his belief in Kojima’s philosophy. He cannot be satisfied with the idea that meaningful suffering is all there is, causing him to consider alternatives, such as disappearance and even death, as a way out of his suffering.
When the narrator finally confronts Momose, he presents a compelling counterpoint to Kojima’s philosophy. Momose presents a vision of the world that clashes with the idea of a meaningful universe. His philosophy hinges on the idea that the world is inherently chaotic and meaningless, which is evidenced by the existence of contradiction. In a world where people can believe in contradictory ideas, Momose thinks that nothing can compel them to believe that the other person is right. As a result, no idea is fundamentally true and people are allowed to believe what they want to believe.
Though Momose does not ground his philosophy in empathy, as Kojima does, they both believe in self-determination. Kojima insists on upholding suffering as a strength and avoiding the temptation to become a blind follower; Momose believes in asserting his will and following his own path, without paying attention to the world’s beliefs of morality. In this way, Kojima and Momose value independent thinking and detest those who follow the crowd. However, what stands out most to the narrator is the idea that he has a personal responsibility to guide the shape of his own life, regardless of the way others act upon it or try to influence it. In other words, he comes to see that understanding other human beings is futile; willpower is the only real faculty that impacts human life.
Before the narrator speaks with Momose, he has seen disappearing from the world as a way out of his troubles. His desire to disappear doesn’t focus solely on death, but as a way to escape the attention of others. As early as Chapter 2, the narrator imagines what it would be like to be treated as an object instead of a person. By Chapter 4, he is too overwhelmed by his fear of being rejected by Kojima to answer her long letter. In the days leading up to his confrontation with Momose, the narrator continues to avoid her and withhold a response, even as Kojima writes additional letters to him. He would also like to disappear from Kojima’s life in the hope of avoiding her disappointment and rejection since he is terrified of her displeasure.
While the narrator thinks it would be easy for him to disappear, Kojima’s and Momose’s philosophies champion an alternative course of action—they inspire him to take some action about his dilemma instead. Kojima floats the idea of standing up to the bullies and confronting them. Momose believes that the narrator doesn’t have it in him to do such a thing because the narrator’s guilt and self-consciousness prevent him from fully committing to any form of retaliation. However, the narrator’s decision to confront Momose in the first place is already a sign of defiance building up in him. Similarly, the narrator has not quite fully abandoned Kojima’s call to understand and empathize with people. He even notices Kojima’s changed attitude toward her bullies while they are not communicating, which shows that he still cares about her.
For her part, Kojima shows no signs of wanting to abandon the narrator, despite the fact that he has stopped writing and speaking to her. At the gym, after the narrator is beaten up, Kojima tries to assure the narrator that the bullies are actually scared of him. She weeps because she knows how much pain he is in, showing how easily she empathizes with suffering. The narrator’s beating galvanizes her to become braver and more defiant in the face of harassment. She believes that the bullies can’t understand the value of weakness. She comes to see that to act defiantly would only make them more afraid of her, which foreshadows the course of action she eventually takes against them in the book’s final chapters.
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