Ms Ice Sandwich
About
A boy goes to the supermarket almost every day, not for groceries but to look at the woman who sells sandwiches. He calls her Ms Ice Sandwich. He draws her portrait obsessively. His fascination is not romantic — he is too young for that — but something more mysterious: a pure, inarticulate response to a face that strikes him as the most beautiful thing in the world. Mieko Kawakami captures the interior life of a child with uncanny precision — the way a young mind fixates on something it cannot understand, and the way that fixation becomes a lens through which everything else is seen. The boy's grandmother is dying; his family is fracturing; but Ms Ice Sandwich's face remains constant, a still point in a shifting world. A short, luminous novel about the first time you see beauty and don't have the words for it — and the private, stubborn devotion that takes the place of language.
