Breasts and Eggs

Product Information

Kawakami writes with a remarkable frankness grounded in bodily experience and emotional honesty. Women’s bodies and experiences are centred in the narrative; she writes of menstruation, ovulation, pregnancy with a candor that renders them a natural part of the story. Nothing is forced or didactic; nor is anything whitewashed. A recurrent theme in Book One is Natsuko’s sister Makiko’s desire for breast implants, and the arguments and dilemmas this produces. The journal entries written by Natsuko’s niece, Midoriko, in Book One chronicle a teenager’s efforts to grapple with her changing body and the misogyny she encounters in school and life. Breasts and Eggs looks at the various moral, practical and bureaucratic factors that need to be accounted for while deciding to bring a new life into the world. It is a sharp critique of biopolitics under neoliberalism. The questions it poses are especially relevant today, given how far assistive reproductive technology has come, while the State wields a disproportionate amount of power to decide who has the right to have children and who does not.

DB: There are so many things that connect these two books, but—personally—it’s the differences that really stand out. Whether it’s a cotranslation or not, as a translator, I’m always worried about being too comfortable with an author I’ve already translated, or seeing stylistic continuities that aren’t there. There are so many sides to Mieko’s writing, and it’s important that we do justice to that. When we were working on the translation, we spoke about similarities that we’d noticed between the books. I think that our ability to have that kind of conversation guaranteed that we wouldn’t revert to the ways we’d done things in a prior project. It’s an insightful angle, although as she also observes, we all form our own personal relationships with these authors and their characters, and some experience Murakami with a sense of discomfort. As a reader, what I enjoy is Murakami’s often successful efforts to avoid both social norms and literary tropes; but what brings me discomfort is a lingering feeling that the world he depicts remains one that preponderantly reflects a male gaze. Speaking From the SelfThe meetings that disorient Natsuko, however, are with two acquaintances whose biological fathers were anonymous sperm donors. Aizawa was raised by a father he loved; Yuriko was raised by a paedophile whose horrific abuse has robbed her of all well-being. Every decision to bring a child into this ugly existence, Yuriko argues, is an act of violence. “Nobody should be doing this,” she tells Natsuko, adding, “You know what makes you think doing that’s okay? … whoever the child is, the one who lives and dies consumed with pain, could never be you.” Yuriko’s words reverberate throughout Breasts and Eggs as Kawakami places birth itself under scrutiny. We are thrown into a world that surrounds us with its netting; some flourish, others suffocate. Kawakami, like Yoshimoto, is more firmly rooted in reality, yet both engage in occasional, brief and controlled descents into fantasy as a technique to further character development. To truly develop a character it is necessary to understand them both in the real world and in the dreamy fantasies into which we all drift.

Yet as Natsuko contemplates her possible relationship with her own pregnant body, Kawakami presents an extreme alternative: society giving up on reproduction altogether. At the novel’s turning point, Yuriko suggests that birth itself might be considered a violation of bodily autonomy. In recent years, the anti-natalist movement – or at least discussion of it – has entered the mainstream, buoyed by work from philosophers including David Benatar and Sarah Perry. While climate change is a factor, anti-natalism is more controversially driven by a moral debate about whether it is justifiable to subject someone else to the difficulties of human existence, including the very fact of being ‘trapped’ in a body. Although she is not an anti-natalist, the philosopher Alison Stone has written recently about how being born is the most decisive and yet under-discussed aspect of human experience: ‘We can explain, at least to a point, why the particular body that I happen to be born with was conceived (my parents met, a particular sperm fertilised a particular egg on a given occasion – and the rest). But that does not explain why this body is the one whose life I happen to be leading and experiencing directly, from the inside. This is just a fact, and because it is inexplicable, a dimension of mystery pervades my existence.’ The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki Murakami as Japan’s most important contemporary novelist, WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE. Discussion of Japanese writers inevitably swings around to the ‘I-novel’, the ubiquitous literary genre centred in first-person ‘confessional’ narratives and honed to an exceptional degree in 20th and 21st century Japanese literature. While Kawakami’s work falls into that genre, what renders it exceptional is the fierceness of its social critique. Breasts and Eggs has a ferocity that is neither didactic nor exceedingly obvious; it is, rather, conveyed through an extreme honesty and candor that erodes norms by questioning and revealing the contradictions they disguise. The sequel novel was translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd, [15] but kept the original title of Breasts and Eggs. [13] The translation was published in the United States by Europa Editions on 7 April 2020. [16] It was published in the United Kingdom by Picador on 20 August 2020. [17] [18]Note: Kawakami Mieko's 乳と卵 ('Breasts and Eggs') was a novella that won the 2007 (II) Akutagawa Prize; more than a decade later, she revised and expanded (considerably) on it, a version that was then published in 2019 as 夏物語 ('Summer Stories'); the English-language editions of the latter have now, somewhat confusingly, been published under the former title (while the original 'Breasts and Eggs' was never published in (English) translation).

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Amidst all of this is Natsuko, who watches it all unfold from a place of relative calm and quiet. Natsuko is well defined in her own right but far less aggressively compelling as her sister and niece, which is an asset to the success of the story. Motherhood then is the central issue in the longer second book of the novel, with Natsuko -- thirty-eight when the second part begins, a leap eight years ahead -- finding a deep-rooted urge to have a child.She leads a relatively isolated life, occasionally meeting old co-workers (all women) or her editor (a woman), and she remains in touch with her sister and niece (but mainly via phone and text), but basically on her own. If you bring a new life into the world, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re waking one of these kids up. You know what makes you think doing that’s okay? Because it’s got nothing to do with you.” My monolithic expectation of what a woman's body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to my body.