He goes as far as to insist that if you’re really thinking of making the other person feel good/happy, then it’s not really a romantic infatuation. It’s also ably translated by Louise Heal Kawai, who does a good job of rendering the child’s voice into English. These frustrations amalgamate and create friction in his relationships, especially with Tutti from whom he so desperately wants to be understood. However, the principal character was endearing and their attempts to understand human interaction was charming . She gently reminds us to not underestimate children’s intelligence nor their perception of the world.

Ms Ice Sandwich is a quirky and immediately engaging novella, about a young boy's obsession with a woman who sells sandwiches from a counter in his local supermarket.The author does not really spend any time weaving a mystery around the lady's face (something which I rather expected to happen), she chooses to focus on the boy's feelings and perceptions of the woman instead. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. As someone with more guy pals than gal pals, I always appreciate novels with stories without a ‘forced’ romantic subplot between the main characters of different gender/sex.

But life has a way of interfering – there is his mother, forever distracted, who can tell the fortunes of women; his grandmother, silently dying, who listens to his heart; and his classmate, Tutti, no stranger to pain, who shares her private thrilling world with him. For starters, he lives with his Grandma who was once a large part of his life but now is squeezing out the last ounces of life mostly asleep in her chair. It’s interesting to me when a novel focuses on societal pressures, against our internal ones, and the Japanese authors tend to do such an excellent job of writing about the conflict.

Stories with child protagonists, stories about adolescence, and coming-of-age stories are not usually what I reach for. Ice Sandwich of the title - all come into clearer focus as the narrative moves along, both for him and for us. I had the thought that to create a proper love song, you need to confront a certain kind of shallowness and selfishness. Myself being a fairly timid child that had no inclination to leave behind some of my more childish tastes in games, hobbies and movies around this age, I deeply felt his discomfort when he shows up for a movie night at Tutti’s house and she puts on the Al Pacino film Heat.

Later on he manages to find a friend but she also has problems and their friendship is an unstable one. As I find often with Japanese literature, the pace and character of the book feels very different from western literature: it has a kind of indefinite feeling to it, like the question: "yes, but what is the point? It’s like there’s a barrier of barbed wire or something, except it’s invisible, that keeps us away from them. In addition to certain standard Google cookies, reCAPTCHA sets a necessary cookie (_GRECAPTCHA) when executed for the purpose of providing its risk analysis.Behind the whimsical tone and exquisite humor, there is melancholy about a wise and honest child's profound loneliness. EXPERTLY translated (and I know I'm very particular, I can't help it - see my review of Dandelions たんぽぽ). First friendship, first love, probably not the first loss and all in the same year - that's a lot for 4th grader to get through, but he manages it, with a little help of blue crayons and egg sandwiches. The narrator is watching his old life mold itself into a new life and feels the lack of stability in the metamorphosis.

Our boy, who is fascinated by her blue eyelids, her eyes, her face, and her aloofness, purchases sandwiches from her just so he can observe her more closely. This scene is so rife with sexual tension without ever touching upon sexuality or sexual language and is just a masterpiece of small fiction.Bilingual reading in Japanese and English (mostly in Japanese since the language is so simple, but English translation seems to be brilliantly done). Over the course of a summer he visits the supermarket each day to watch as she slips sandwiches into bags and hands out change. A brilliant work of literature written in the perspective of a child – experiencing and expressing the earliest feelings of non-familial love, attraction and desire (although one can argue that it has some sexual undertones, I personally couldn’t see it that way). This is the only refuge he has, for his emotionally distant mother, a medium, evinces little interest in his problems.