Breasts and Eggs

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It’s not often that a book comes garlanded with both lavish praise and laughable criticism, but Breasts and Eggs has been labelled “breathtaking” by Haruki Murakami and “intolerable” by Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo. Mieko Kawakami’s novel reportedly riled conservatives and the literary establishment in Japan on publication in 2008, but went on to become prizewinning and bestselling. Now it’s a buzzy release here. But while Breasts and Eggs features incisive commentary on being a woman and a mother, and some surreally intense passages, I struggled to understand the fervour it’s inspired.

Kawakami said she never intended Breasts and Eggs to be a feminist novel. She wanted to write about the human experience.Her editor thinks she should get her priorities straight and forget about this motherhood idea: "You've got bigger fish to fry".

But Mieko Kawakami has honed her technique in ways that distinguish her work from these other authors. There is an element of restraint in Banana Yoshimoto’s work, which brings her to the edge of sexual and psychological candour, yet ultimately relies on leaving a great deal implied and unsaid. Kawakami pushes boundaries further – she doesn’t fear exploring the messiness of bodies and sexuality, and she’s unapologetic in her very direct criticism of misogyny, reproductive and body politics, and other social norms. Yet she couches this in the familiar interior voice, which allows readers to maintain a sense of intimacy with her protagonists. We like the protagonists. We get them. We realize that in many ways, we are them. Writing Women’s Lives It’s complicated, is the basic answer to the situations Kawakami throws at the reader; but what a superb job she does of portraying that complexity in full and thorough detail. Some characters make a compelling argument that having children at all is a vain and narcissistic act; an inherent act of violence against the child who never asked to be brought into a world of misery and pain. Does the possibility that a child might love their life justify the gamble, or the sorrow of all those who experience lives of pain, misery and deprivation? In Book One, we see the world through the eyes of Natsuko, a thirty-year-old woman living alone in a Tokyo apartment and working tirelessly in her spare time to become an author. Breasts and Eggs is a two-part novel, with book one -- essentially the Akutagawa Prize-winning novel 'Breasts and Eggs', published in 2008 -- set on a few hot summer days in 2008 and book two beginning eight years later, in 2016. Breasts and Eggs ( Japanese: 乳と卵, Hepburn: Chichi to Ran) is a short novel by Mieko Kawakami, published by Bungeishunjū in February 2008. It was awarded the 138th Akutagawa Prize. [1] The original work has not been translated into English.It’s complicated. I wrestled with Natsuko’s eventual resolution of this dilemma, and still do. It’s the sign of a thought-provoking book that it lingers long after you finish. At first I thought Natsuko’s way of dealing with the dilemma was a hasty wrap-up to conclude the story, but now I’m not so sure. The story is fundamentally about Natsuko finding her own voice and sense of self; learning to put herself and her needs first. In the end, she stays true to that. Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work. I am absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do. Even if it turns out that I don’t have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there’s nothing I can do about this feeling. I can’t make it go away.” Natsuko is obviously torn a bit, and concerned that having a child might pull her away from her writing, but admirably Kawakami doesn't put that at the fore: Natsuko never really frames it as an either/or proposition -- nor does she go into this with any certainty that she can balance the two. The English translation is divided in two parts and is narrated by Natsuko Natsume (夏子 Natsuko), an aspiring writer in Tokyo. In the first part, Natsuko's sister, Makiko (巻子), and her 12-year-old daughter, Midoriko (緑子), arrive in Tokyo from Osaka. Makiko has come to Tokyo seeking a clinic for breast augmentation. Midoriko has not spoken to her mother in six months. Midoriko's journal entries are interspersed and contain her thoughts about becoming a woman and recognizing the changes in her body. In the second part, set years later, Natsuko contemplates becoming a mother and the options open to her as an older single woman in Japan. It's in looking into the subject that she befriends Aizawa -- whose own history however suggests some of the damage that might result when a child does not know the identity of their biological father.

The first section of the novel, set in 2008, revolves around a rare visit by her considerably (almost a decade) older sister, Makiko, and Makiko's daughter, Midoriko, to Tokyo.The first and the second parts do have a slightly different feel -- the first a sort of separate whole, which isn't fully tied together with the second (those eight years are a hell of a leap, all of a sudden) -- but the differences aren't too jarring. Yuriko’s philosophy is similar to that of real-world philosopher David Benetar, an anti-natalist who believes that, since life is so difficult and painful, we should not force our children to have to go through it themselves. The Japan-specific details, especially about family (and family-lines), and the way both the law and society look upon procreation give an interesting twist to the story; in this sense, it is definitely a foreign tale, as American or European experiences would be shaped very differently simply because of the way society and the law function there. There's a bit of an over-reliance on drunk scenes, and some of the discussions about getting pregnant without a partner bog down a bit, but overall Breasts and Eggs is quite consistently engaging. 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.