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A review by stanro
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
5.0
As I am booked to travel to Japan soon, I am audioreading this in preparation, excitedly hearing unfamiliar places and foods and personal names and the way the words are said.
It is a challenging book for a cis western male to read, as it deals so intimately with the female body and women’s attitudes to it.
The principal character is Natsu, a struggling author, unpartnered and childless, who we meet when she is thirty and living in Tokyo. Her older sister Makiko and her daughter Midoriko are visiting for a few days so Makiko can consult clinics about having breast augmentation surgery. At this stage, Midoriko has been not speaking to her mother for about 6 months and this extends to her aunt Natsu. When she needs to, she writes in a notebook to communicate. She also keeps a diary and from its excerpts we learn about a young girl approaching pubescencce and about her concerns about her mother and her breasts obsession.
Skip forward some eight years (to 2016) and Natsu is still unpartnered and childless and conscious of the pages of her biological calendar turning. She is now a published author of one book (there is a great sequence of a literary ‘meet the author’s night’ that leads her to a friendship with another female author) and this success is sufficient for her to live in a better district and to send her sister some money each month. Midoriko is in her latish teens and seems to have resumed normal communication.
At 38, Natsu is exploring artificial insemination and considering single parenthood. She attends a seminar where a participant says: “Having a child has always been determined by forces beyond our control, by nature. But with donor conception, it’s all about ego. Foremost, the egos of the parents, but also the egos of the doctors, who view the life they bring into the world as an end that glorifies the means.”
I’m enjoying this book as it swallows me up into its Japanese milieu, with exotic names and foods and bath house customs and other fleeting cultural references.
And at this stage of the book, Natsu’s life is more interactive. She meets Sengawa, her editor, often. There’s an encounter with a former bookstore colleague whose story about her life is quite heart-rending in its way. And there’s a fellow author with whom a friendship is growing and a male doctor, progeny of sperm donation, with whom she is developing a friendship. Will it lead to something deeper? And there is her meeting with the narcissistic self-obsessed potential direct sperm donor!
Compared with the relative emotional and expressive restraint of the first part of the book, this part, set eight years later, is more emotionally rollicking.
Not long ago I read Lionel Shriver’s Should We Stay Or Should We Go, in which she covered her subject matter of planned dying, and it’s alternatives, very thoroughly.
This covers it’s subject matter very thoroughly and, I’d say, more conversationally.
I’ve always been puzzled by the strength of certainty that would-be parents have about having a child as their right and natural thing to do that must be achieved. And as for the fierce determination of some who are childless, to overcome that, this has left me more than just puzzled. In this book there is a timely conversation between Natsu, who seems close to attempting artificial insemination, and another woman, Yuriko, who argues that regardless of the means of insemination, the real question is why have a child at all. She formulates having a child as a violence against the child. And again asks, “why?”
Eventually, the book reaches its not-too-hard-to-anticipate conclusion. The last third of the book gallops along compared with the preceding part. Still very well written.
“His hair was neat as ever, swept back like reeds in water,” Natsuko says of Izawa.
Meanwhile, in another meeting, Yuriko says “But I can never accept life. Not if I want to go on living.”
This is fine writing. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A postscript about the audio version. Later in the book, the silence between chapters, typically about 5 seconds in most audiobooks, stretches to about a minute. You are left for a long time to let what you’ve just heard reverberate. And to check that your device is functioning properly 😀.
It is a challenging book for a cis western male to read, as it deals so intimately with the female body and women’s attitudes to it.
The principal character is Natsu, a struggling author, unpartnered and childless, who we meet when she is thirty and living in Tokyo. Her older sister Makiko and her daughter Midoriko are visiting for a few days so Makiko can consult clinics about having breast augmentation surgery. At this stage, Midoriko has been not speaking to her mother for about 6 months and this extends to her aunt Natsu. When she needs to, she writes in a notebook to communicate. She also keeps a diary and from its excerpts we learn about a young girl approaching pubescencce and about her concerns about her mother and her breasts obsession.
Skip forward some eight years (to 2016) and Natsu is still unpartnered and childless and conscious of the pages of her biological calendar turning. She is now a published author of one book (there is a great sequence of a literary ‘meet the author’s night’ that leads her to a friendship with another female author) and this success is sufficient for her to live in a better district and to send her sister some money each month. Midoriko is in her latish teens and seems to have resumed normal communication.
At 38, Natsu is exploring artificial insemination and considering single parenthood. She attends a seminar where a participant says: “Having a child has always been determined by forces beyond our control, by nature. But with donor conception, it’s all about ego. Foremost, the egos of the parents, but also the egos of the doctors, who view the life they bring into the world as an end that glorifies the means.”
I’m enjoying this book as it swallows me up into its Japanese milieu, with exotic names and foods and bath house customs and other fleeting cultural references.
And at this stage of the book, Natsu’s life is more interactive. She meets Sengawa, her editor, often. There’s an encounter with a former bookstore colleague whose story about her life is quite heart-rending in its way. And there’s a fellow author with whom a friendship is growing and a male doctor, progeny of sperm donation, with whom she is developing a friendship. Will it lead to something deeper? And there is her meeting with the narcissistic self-obsessed potential direct sperm donor!
Compared with the relative emotional and expressive restraint of the first part of the book, this part, set eight years later, is more emotionally rollicking.
Not long ago I read Lionel Shriver’s Should We Stay Or Should We Go, in which she covered her subject matter of planned dying, and it’s alternatives, very thoroughly.
This covers it’s subject matter very thoroughly and, I’d say, more conversationally.
I’ve always been puzzled by the strength of certainty that would-be parents have about having a child as their right and natural thing to do that must be achieved. And as for the fierce determination of some who are childless, to overcome that, this has left me more than just puzzled. In this book there is a timely conversation between Natsu, who seems close to attempting artificial insemination, and another woman, Yuriko, who argues that regardless of the means of insemination, the real question is why have a child at all. She formulates having a child as a violence against the child. And again asks, “why?”
Eventually, the book reaches its not-too-hard-to-anticipate conclusion. The last third of the book gallops along compared with the preceding part. Still very well written.
“His hair was neat as ever, swept back like reeds in water,” Natsuko says of Izawa.
Meanwhile, in another meeting, Yuriko says “But I can never accept life. Not if I want to go on living.”
This is fine writing. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A postscript about the audio version. Later in the book, the silence between chapters, typically about 5 seconds in most audiobooks, stretches to about a minute. You are left for a long time to let what you’ve just heard reverberate. And to check that your device is functioning properly 😀.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Pedophilia and Sexual violence