Breasts and Eggs

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And then there’s the men. Virtually every male character in the novel is an unpleasant one. This is neither didactic nor misplaced; Kawakami goes to tremendous lengths to construct secondary characters that reveal with a simple and straightforward honesty the misogyny most men carry around and enact, often without realizing it. These range from adult men and fathers who abuse young girls, to sexually aggressive and manipulative strangers, to seemingly good men who cannot, in the end, put their mansplaining tendencies aside. 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 Self In 2019 Kawakami published Natsu monogatari (literally “Summer stories” but translated here as Breasts and Eggs). A substantially reworked version—and that is being generous—of her novella now forms the first third of this Breasts and Eggs (“Book 1”). To that is added a significantly longer section (“Book 2”) exploring Natsuko’s relationship to the notion of pregnancy and sperm donation. Book 1 hews fairly closely—although there are obvious sections where Kawakami sought to gild the lily—to the 2008 novella, but those additions do nothing to facilitate the connection to book 2 and, consequently, feel superfluous. Kawakami, who exploded into the cultural space first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and most importantly as a best-selling novelist, challenges every preconception about storytelling and prose style. She is currently one of Japan’s most widely read and critically acclaimed authors, heralded by Haruki Murakami as his favorite young writer. An earlier novella published in Japan with the same title focused on the female body, telling the story of three women: the thirty-year-old unmarried narrator, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter Midoriko. Unable to come to terms with her changed body after giving birth, Makiko becomes obsessed with the prospect of getting breast enhancement surgery. Meanwhile, her twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko is paralyzed by the fear of her oncoming puberty and finds herself unable to voice the vague, yet overwhelming anxieties associated with growing up. The narrator, who remains unnamed for most of the story, struggles with her own indeterminable identity of being neither a “daughter” nor a “mother.” Set over three stiflingly hot days in Tokyo, the book tells of a reunion of sorts, between two sisters, and the passage into womanhood of young Midoriko. In this greatly expanded version, a second chapter in the story of the same women opens on another hot summer’s day ten years later. The narrator, single and childless, having reconciled herself with the idea of never marrying, nonetheless feels increasing anxiety about growing old alone and about never being a mother. In episodes that are as comical as they are revealing of deep yearning, she seeks direction from other women in her life—her mother, her grandmother, friends, as well as her sister—and only after dramatic and frequent changes of heart, decides in favor of artificial insemination. But this decision in a deeply conservative country in which women’s reproductive rights are under constant threat is not one that can be acted upon without great drama. Breasts and Eggs takes as its broader subjects the ongoing repression of women in Japan and the possibility of liberation, poverty, domestic violence, and reproductive ethics. Mixing comedy and realism, it is an epic life-affirming journey about finding inner strength and peace. Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami – eBook Details On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by her daughter, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsuko’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another.

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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.

Issue No. 2

Section two, the bulk of the book, is digressive and reflective. Natsuko is working on a second novel. She wants to have a child but her body cannot tolerate sex, which disquiets and grieves her. Artificial insemination is forbidden to single Japanese women: she must either go to a sperm bank outside the country or make illegal arrangements with a donor. This section is made up of conversations as Natsuko passes time with a fellow writer, an editor, a former co-worker, and briefly, Makiko and Midoriko. What all these authors share is a mastery over the interior voice. Time is languorous in their work; secondary characters come and go. Narratives are rarely straightforward, either in terms of plot or chronology. Everything is rendered secondary to development of the main character, and the process(es) they are dealing with — healing, growth, change, reconciliation.

Breasts and Eggs’ - The White Review Mieko Kawakami’s ‘Breasts and Eggs’ - The White Review

At first the two of us felt good enough to chat and laugh, but the heat soon got the better of us, and we stopped talking. The incessant spray of the cicadas clogged our ears, and the sunlight pinched our skin. The roof tiles and the trees and the manhole covers hummed with white-hot summer light, but the brighter it got, the darker everything appeared. By the time we made it to my apartment, the three of us were soaked in sweat. My first visit to Tokyo Station was ten years earlier, the summer I turned twenty. It was a day like today, when you can never wipe off all the sweat. Ironically, Kawakami herself has defended Murakami’s fictional females. In the superb essay “Acts of Recognition: On the Women Characters of Haruki Murakami”, Kawakami offers a fierce defense of Murakami’s characters, arguing that Murakami was among the first Japanese male writers whose “women are people.” (She also engages this theme in a fascinating one-on-one interview between her and Murakami – “A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself”.The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki Murakami as Japan’s most important contemporary novelist, WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE. I still don’t really know why Makiko and her husband separated. I remember having lots of conversations with Makiko about her ex and whether they should get divorced, and I remember it was bad, but now I can’t remember how it happened. Makiko’s ex came from Tokyo, where he grew up. He moved to Osaka for work. They hadn’t been together very long when Makiko got pregnant. One thing I kind of remember is the way he called Makiko baby. Nobody talked like that in Osaka. They only said that in the movies. 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.’ Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, takes its characters and setting from a novella initially published in 2008 (and awarded Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize). We first meet Natsuko as a 30-year-old Osakan writer living hand-to-mouth in Tokyo, receiving a two-day visit during an overbearing summer from her older sister Makiko and her silent 12-year-old niece Midoriko, whose diary entries about the travails of puberty and sex education interweave with Natsuko’s narration. Makiko – who works in an Osaka hostess bar and is worried about the effects of ageing on her employability – has come to the city to explore options for cheap breast augmentation, her obsession forcing a wedge between her and the other characters. In the second half, set ten years later in 2017, Natsu procrastinates over her second book, while researching options for artificial insemination. Her sexual identity is her biggest obstacle, emotional and practical: what right does she have to a child, she wonders, as an asexual woman who refuses the structure of normative coupling? Her research leads her to Aizawa, an advocate for non-anonymous donation, which is illegal in Japan, and his girlfriend Yuriko, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The two encounters prove decisive. Canfield, David (13 April 2020). "A literary star in Japan, Mieko Kawakami is ready for her American debut". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved 22 October 2020.

Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami - Google Books

You only know what it means to be poor, or have the right to talk about it, if you’ve been there yourself. Maybe you’re poor now. Maybe you were poor in the past. I’m both. I was born poor, and I’m still poor. Mieko Kawakami‘s Breasts and Eggs is one of the most remarkable feminist novels to appear in the English language (even if it was originally published in Japanese). We can stay tonight and tomorrow, but we’ve got to leave the day after that, so I can get to work that night. I wonder what it feels like. I hear it hurts pretty bad, but that’s not even the worst part. Once it starts, it keeps happening, for decades. How does that ever feel normal? I know Jun got hers. She told me. But it’s weird how everyone knows I haven’t. I mean, it’s not like everyone goes around telling people when it happens. It’s not like everyone waves around their little kits for all to see when they go to the bathroom. How can everyone just tell like that?The 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.