Breasts and Eggs

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McNeill, David (18 August 2020). "Mieko Kawakami: 'Women are no longer content to shut up' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 November 2020. Makiko, the one visiting me today from Osaka, is my older sister. She’s thirty-nine and has a twelve-year-old daughter named Midoriko. She raised the girl herself. What had come over me? The whole day I'd been running through old memories, getting lost in my own thoughts. But I guess that made sense. It was only natural. Despite Makiko being, in the present, my closest living relative, the bulk of our shared experiences were in the past, from another planet. In that sense, spending time with Makiko meant living in the past.” For every reason". Rie emptied her sake cup. "Let's start with how she viewed my dad. He was your typical king of the hill. We couldn't say anything growing up. I was a kid, and a girl on top of that, so he never saw me as a real person. I never even heard the guy call my mother by name. It was always Hey you. We were constantly on red alert because my dad would beat the shit out of us or break things for no reason. Of course, outside the home, he was a pillar of the community. He ran the neighborhood council, and all that. My mom was my mom, always laughing it off, running the bath for him, cleaning up after him, feeding him. She looked after both of his parents all the way to the end, too. There was no inheritance, either. Yeah, my mom was free labor - free labor with a pussy.” If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don't ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that's all you need to know.”

Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami - Google Books Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami - Google Books

What do you get if you cross a minimalist style with a maximalist length? That isn’t a joke, by the way; I really don’t know the answer, except to say that Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami’s first full novel to be translated into English, comes pretty close. Indeed, Natsuko’s various decisions throughout the book – never predictable – may be read as a growing assertiveness, not just against the men in her life but against all the norms of a society rooted in deeply patriarchal and illogical values. But as far as I’m concerned, no one who’s ever been poor could think like that. A garden view? A nice big window? Who has a garden, though? And what the hell could make a window nice?In terms of rhythm and raunchiness, I’m not sure – when comparing the two strikingly different translations at length – which part is Kawakami, which the rehousing and reimagining that is translation. Section two is where the question is most pressing: this extended part of the novel flags because its questions about female freedom are reiterated – except by Yuriko – in fairly standard ways. Would representing Natsuko’s irreverent Osaka dialect, her linguistic inventiveness, have thrown a wrench in things? Is Kawakami’s mix of comedy and pain more acute, stinging and revolutionary than it appears in English? Well, we use words to communicate, right? Still, most of our words don’t actually get across. You know what I mean? Well, our words might, but not what we’re actually trying to say. That’s what we’re always dealing with. We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.” Kawakami systematically up-ends all of these tropes, and the reader barely sees it coming. Her main character is asexual. Although she enjoys emotional and intellectual intimacy with men, she finds sex and sexual intimacy unpleasant. However much asexuality may be trending in the academic sphere, we have yet to see many mainstream novels with asexual main characters, and Natsuko is a beautifully complex, compelling and sympathetic character.

Mieko Kawakami’s ‘Breasts and Eggs’ Is a Feminist Masterpiece Mieko Kawakami’s ‘Breasts and Eggs’ Is a Feminist Masterpiece

But we get to read Midoriko’s diary entries, and learn that her silence is a manifestation of her horror at what she has learned about growing up as a woman: “Set up to give birth, even before I was born. I wish I could rip out all those parts of me, the parts already rushing to give birth.”

As her characters stumble toward middle age, they wrestle with the ubiquitous question of reproduction. Natsuko has no partner, nor does she even enjoy sex, but she thinks she might like to have a child, and so she gradually fixates on the idea of artificial insemination. Kawakami uses this as a device to explore and critique the misogynistic and heteronormative state of access to reproductive technologies in contemporary Japan, but her questioning goes further than how to have children. Why to have children is a key theme in Book Two, and neither the author nor her protagonists fall for any easy answers.