Ijime as an Organised Crime: Foucauldian Reading of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven

Abstract

Bullying, known in Japan as ijime, is a serious and widespread problem in Japanese high schools. Unlike simple fights or one-on-one teasing, ijime often involves whole groups turning against one person, with teachers and adults frequently staying silent or looking away. Despite decades of policy interventions and student protests, ijime persists as a structurally embedded phenomenon. Mieko Kawakami's 2009 novel Heaven tells the story of a 14-year-old boy nicknamed "Eyes," who is brutally and constantly bullied because of his lazy eye, and his friendship with another bullied girl, Kojima. The book not only explains why the bullying happens; instead, it shows how normal it has become for everyone around them. Violence becomes difficult to resist or even identify. While the existing scholarship has examined Heaven through the lens of power relations among characters, trauma, or gender, no study has yet explored how the author uses the elements of crime fiction, like unreliable narrative, suspense, and detailed description of violence, etc., to show that bullying is kind of an organised crime that the school system allows to continue and does not take any action. The study will employ close reading of the text and will compare Heaven to older Japanese crime writers like Edogawa Ranpo to show how Kawakami updates the genre. The paper will also employ a Foucauldian framework to show that ijime is not just personal cruelty, but part of a system that controls and judges people. Heaven shows how victims begin to see themselves through others’ eyes, leading to self-monitoring, shame, and sometimes a wish to disappear rather than fight back.