Breasts and Eggs

Product Information

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. This philosophical thinking, especially about the road from birth to death, certainly comes out in Breasts and Eggs. Most aggressively and vividly, it’s seen in the words of Yuriko, a character who exists almost as a philosophical plot device, obsessed as she is with the idea that giving birth is an unforgivably cruel act. 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.

From Makiko, who is struggling to make ends meet but is determined to go through with breast augmentation surgery, to Natsuko, who has climbed the social ladder and “wants to meet her future child”, to Yuriko, who has concluded that bringing a baby into the world is the worst thing an individual can do, Kawakami introduces a wide variety of characters and positions. It then becomes impossible for the reader not to dwell on how an individual’s positionality with respect to class, gender, race and sexuality shapes their experiences. The ostensible reason for Makiko's visit to Tokyo is because she is considering getting breast implants. The story follows a weekend visit from her older sister, Makiko, who brings along her young teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko’s main reason for visiting Tokyo from Osaka is not really to see her sister so much as it is to consult a plastic surgeon about breast enhancements.

Cite this review

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. They can't do anything around the house without making a ton of noise, not even close the fridge or turn the lights on.

A rare positive figure is Jun Aizawa -- but he is also troubled, a doctor who learned late in life that his father wasn't his biological father, and that his mother had had a sperm donor. 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 writes with ruthless honesty about the bodily experience of being a woman" - Holly Williams, The Guardian Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body -- its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions. And she is especially good at capturing its longings, those in this novel being at once obsessive and inchoate, and in one way or another about transformation. (...) Kawakami's prose is supple and casual, unbothered with the kinds of sentences routinely described as "luminous." But into these stretches of plain speech she regularly drops phrases that made me giddy with pleasure." - Katie Kitamura, The New York Times Book Review

McNeill, David (18 August 2020). "Mieko Kawakami: 'Women are no longer content to shut up' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 November 2020. Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police Breasts and Eggs, which caused a small sensation upon its publication in the UK and US last year, was a fierce yet thoughtful tale of working-class womanhood The second part of Breasts and Eggs is then largely about Natsuko considering having a child, and how to do so without involving a man too directly -- certainly avoiding actual sex, but she isn't too keen on any sort of personal connection regarding the whole thing.