Breasts and Eggs

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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.

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

I was wondering about the men in menarche. Turns out it’s the same as the men in menstruation. It means month, which comes from moon, and has to do with women and their monthly cycle. Moon has all kinds of meanings. In addition to being the thing orbiting the earth, it can involve time, or tides, like the ebb and flow of the ocean. So menarche has absolutely nothing to do with men. So why spell it that way? What happened to the o? Specifically, Natsu’s concern is that she thinks she would like to be a mother and senses that time may be short; and also she doesn’t like sex. Ultimately she settles on the idea of using donor sperm to become pregnant and much of the book is occupied with her ambivalence toward this self and society-imposed quest.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. Mieko Kawakami. “ Acts of Recognition: On the Women Characters of Haruki Murakami”. Literary Hub. 03 October 2019. 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 Plot-wise, nothing remarkable actually happens in the story. It’s divided into two self-contained but related parts featuring the same cast of characters. Book One takes place over a period of less than 48 hours, while Book Two stretches over the better part of a year. It’s the sort of story where characters go about their day, wrestling with personal demons and navigating interpersonal relationships, but nothing out of the ordinary transpires.

Breasts and Eggs a book by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, and Breasts and Eggs a book by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, and

She worked in Shobashi, the neighborhood the three of us worked in for years after we ran off that night and started our new life with Komi. There was absolutely nothing glamorous about Shobashi. Just rows of tired buildings, crooked and brown with age.One of Japan’s brightest stars is set to explode across the global skies of literature . . . Kawakami is both a writer’s writer and an entertainer, a thinker and constantly evolving stylist who manages to be highly readable and immensely popular.”— Japan Times For poor people, window size isn’t even a concept. Nobody has a view. A window is just a blurry pane of glass hidden behind cramped plywood shelves. Who knows if the thing even opens. It’s a greasy rectangle by the broken extractor fan that your family’s never used and never will. We can stay tonight and tomorrow, but we’ve got to leave the day after that, so I can get to work that night.

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, David Boyd Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, David Boyd

Mieko Kawakami. “ A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself”. Literary Hub. 07 April 2020. An added delight is Kawakami’s gentle exposé of the literary life. Anyone who has struggled as a writer themselves can’t help but both laugh and nod at Natsuko’s efforts to dodge editors, stay awake at book readings and launches, and balance the need to earn money with the desire to produce meaningful work. She portrays with bold honesty the misogyny of the field as well. But she finds positive meaning in other women writers and editors. Female friendships form an important theme in the book, as does the fundamental challenge of creating and maintaining friendships in our alienated, digital age.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. 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. One fascinating element of Kawakami’s work, for which she has been celebrated in Japan, is her use of Osaka dialect. Although this language is described in Breasts and Eggs – “the real Osaka dialect isn’t even about communicating. It’s a contest … How can I put it? It’s an art” – translators Bett and Boyd do not render it. In 2012, an excerpt of Breasts and Eggs was published by another translator, Louise Heal Kawai, who offers Makiko’s “I’ve been thinking about getting breast implants” as “Natsuko, I’m thinking of getting me boobs done”. How old was she, though? Seventy? Older? Wait, hold up. That means she was the same age as Komi. She gasped at her own statement and opened her eyes wide. And she was raped, right?