Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami
Published 2013 · 20,117 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novella
How hard is Ms Ice Sandwich to read?
Ms Ice Sandwich scores 39 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 20 out of 100
- The narration is filtered through a fourth-grade boy's vocabulary — simple concrete nouns, colloquial turns of phrase, and invented nicknames like 'Ms Ice Sandwich,' 'Doo-Wop,' and 'Tutti.' Louise Heal Kawai's translation preserves the child-register faithfully, with no archaic terms, specialized jargon, or invented language. The most demanding vocabulary the text asks of a reader is 'nevermore' and the name of the fairy tale 'The Tinderbox.'
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Kawakami's child narrator strings clauses together with 'and' and 'but' in long, flowing run-ons that mimic a child's thought-pattern — 'I do the same thing every day and that's how I end up spending the whole summer filling myself with Ms Ice Sandwich's eyes (and my stomach with her sandwiches).' While this produces some long sentences, they are grammatically transparent and easy to follow, closer to Diary of a Young Girl than to Henry James. The challenge is tonal, not syntactic.
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- The story stays firmly grounded in concrete, sensory detail: the steps to the supermarket counted by landmarks, the blue of the ice-lolly eyelids, the sound of silver pincers on plastic bags. Kawakami allows themes of mortality, idealized beauty, and the fear of disappearance to emerge from this concrete surface without ever naming or theorizing them. The philosophy of the book belongs to a nine-year-old and never rises above his register.
- Information density: 22 out of 100
- Ms Ice Sandwich is a spare novella of around 27,000 words that dwells rather than accumulates. There is one plotline, one POV, and the emotional content recirculates through repeated visits, repeated drawings, repeated counting of steps. References are few — a film called Heat, a fairy tale called The Tinderbox — and they are integrated slowly. The book demands patience and emotional attentiveness, not informational tracking.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- The narrator understands almost nothing of what the adults around him are doing — his mother's spiritual practice, Ms Ice Sandwich's plastic surgery, Tutti's grief over her dead mother. Yet the reader sees all of it in the gap between what the boy reports and what it means. The cruelty of the schoolgirls, the anger of the man in the supermarket, and Grandma's approaching death are all presented through a child's innocent observation, asking the reader to carry the emotional weight the narrator cannot.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The electric-blue eyelids are the novella's central image — they stand for an idealized beauty that resists the world's cruelty, something seen and preserved rather than understood. The fairy-tale dogs from 'The Tinderbox' weave through the text as an analogue for Ms Ice Sandwich: enormous eyes, running with a princess, heading toward a castle. The boy's portrait, drawn across weeks, becomes an act of devotion, an attempt to hold something before it disappears. The symbols are clear but emotionally weighted.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- The gap between the child narrator's incomprehension and the adult world's cruelty creates pathos rather than Nabokovian irony. When the angry man calls Ms Ice Sandwich a 'painted monster face,' the boy cannot process the violence of it — he simply knows something bad is being said about a face he loves. This gap is poignant rather than deceptive, inviting readers to feel the weight of what the narrator cannot articulate without needing to read against him.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The novella ends quietly: Grandma dies, Ms Ice Sandwich leaves to get married, Tutti and the narrator become friends who perform gunfight scenes together. Nothing is resolved in the sense of explained — why Ms Ice Sandwich had surgery, what the boy's feeling for her really was, whether his mother will ever really attend to him. Kawakami provides emotional closure through accumulation of small images in the final pages without answering the questions the story raises.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- The novella is linear, single-POV, and chronological — a Japanese summer through to December, told by a boy looking back on the season. There are no timeline jumps, no unreliable narrator in the technical sense, no formal experiments. The closest thing to structural complexity is the fairy-tale motif weaving through the boy's consciousness, but it functions as a recurring image rather than a narrative layer.
How Ms Ice Sandwich is regarded
Ms Ice Sandwich holds a literary regard score of 33 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.