A quixotic and funny tale about first love - from the Akutagawa Prize-winning author

‘Ms Ice Sandwich isn’t friendly at all. When the customers come and stand in front of the glass case and stare at all the sandwiches and stuff inside it, she never bothers to say Hello or Can I help you?’

Ms Ice Sandwich seems to lack social graces, but our young narrator is totally smitten with her. He is in awe of her aloofness, her skill at slipping sandwiches into bags, and, most electric of all, her ice-blue eyelids. Every day he is drawn to the supermarket just to watch her in action. 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.

Tender, warm, yet unsentimental, Ms Ice Sandwich is a story about new starts, parents who have departed, and the importance of saying goodbye.

Mieko Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976. Her second novella, Breasts and Eggs (2008), won the Akutagawa Prize and has been translated into Norwegian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean and more. She has published many books, including novels, short stories, essays, and prose poems. In 2016, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Japanese Novelists.

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