Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs arrives with well-deserved fanfare. Kawakami is linked to Haruki Murakami, probably the most widely known Japanese contemporary novelist. They share literary agents. They are connected through the Akutagawa Prize, an award for up-and-coming writers. He was shortlisted twice; she, nominated twice, was awarded the prize in 2008. More notably, she has interviewed him and he has avidly endorsed her as his “favorite young writer” who is “ceaselessly growing and evolving.” He has placed his imprimatur on the novel saying it “took my breath away.”
Kawakami’s celebrity precedes the warm reception to her novel, since she had already established a successful career in pop music as a singer/songwriter. Audiences appreciated her sound in three albums before they rediscovered it as a distinctive voice in narrative fiction.
That happened with her novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World (2007), which was her first Akutagawa nomination; it won the Tsubochi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers (she was 31). The following year she received the prestigious Akutagawa award, recognizing her as a “promising new Japanese writer,” for a shorter version of Breasts and Eggs.
Kawakami then reinvented herself as a blogger, often getting more than 200,000 hits a day. Breasts and Eggs started life as a blog before it morphed into the award-winning novella. Twelve years later, it evolved into the book that has gained her Murakami level attention.
In an interview, Kawakami said “fiction is not about sending a message” — and Breasts and Eggs doesn’t strive to send one. It is propelled by inquisitive and sometimes anxious characters. It is about transformation. It is about a narrator finding her voice as a novelist. It is about self-determination, affirming individual identity, and finding singular happiness.
The title is both literal and metaphorical. There are breasts (natural and enhanced) and eggs (chicken and human). But above all, the novel presents an unusual and disarming approach to what women want — or at least what three particular Japanese women want while underscoring the differences between their desires and notions of happiness.
The novel is divided between Book One and Book Two. Both parts involve the same three main characters — the narrator, Natsuko Natsume; her older married sister, Makiko; and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko.
In the first section, thirty-year old Natusko, originally from Osaka, is a struggling writer living in Tokyo for ten years. In that time she still lives in the “same apartment with the slanted, peeling walls and the same overbearing afternoon sun, surviving off the same minimum wage job, and still writing and writing, with no idea of whether it’s ever going to get [her] anywhere.” No one reads her blog which is “collecting dust in a corner of the internet.” She feels as though her “life was like a dusty shelf in an old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernible change being that [her] body has aged another ten years.”
Thirty nine-year old Makiko is visiting for two days for a consultation on breast augmentation surgery. She has brought sullen, recalcitrant twelve-year old Midoriko with her. Their ages are significant. They don’t just mark their chronological years; they define where each woman is in their respective lives. Unhappiness pervades each of them. Natsuko with her career; Makiko with her obsession of what she considers an insufficient physical self; Midoriko with her combative relationship with incipient puberty and femininity.
Natsuko assesses the concept of beauty and self-image as she tries to understand why Makiko wants to alter her breasts. Natsuko “never became the woman [she] imagined.” Her “monolithic expectation of what a woman’s body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to [her] body.” She felt she was “never pretty.” She attaches beauty to happiness with the reason for why her sister wants the surgery. Wanting “to be beautiful was reason enough. Beauty meant that you were good. And being good meant being happy. “ Though “[h]appiness can be defined all kinds of ways” it is “the base unit of consciousness.”
Midoriko hasn’t talked to her mother for over six months. She carries two notebooks with her. She uses one to write notes to her mother. She uses the other for private thoughts as she begins to deal with adolescence.
She’s learning about “menarche” in health class; she’s learning about “ova” as a different kind of egg from the ones she’s been “eating for [her] whole life.” She learns when “egg and sperm meet, you get a fertilized egg.” She doesn’t understand why anyone would want to have a child. She feels “trapped” inside her own body, feels that “[life] is hard enough with just one body. Why would anyone want to make another one?” And she doesn’t understand why all her mother “ever does is research breast implants” or why she “wants her boobs to be bigger.”
The first section of the novel continues to explore the relationship between the sisters, revealing childhood experiences that defined their personalities. It closes with Natsuko in her bathroom observing her breasts, staring at her body in a mirror, having “no idea where it had come from or where it was going,” feeling as though “this thing that contained [her] would be stuck floating there forever.”
Book Two jumps ahead ten years. It has a bifurcated focus on writing and on motherhood.
Natsuko, nearing forty, has had a modicum of success as a writer. She sees it as her “life’s work”; it is “absolutely positive “ what she is “here to do.” But she also wants it all and is contemplating becoming a single mother.
A short prose poem early in this section reveals her emotional state:
Is this my life?
I’m glad that I can write
I’m thankful for this life
And all the good it’s given me
But can I live like this forever?
I can’t take it — actually that’s not true, that’s a lie
I’m fine on my own
It’s fine, but what about you
Am I really okay
Not knowing you? What if I regret it?
My child, unlike any other,
Can I really say I’m okay
Never knowing you?
Since she has no interest in sex, finding it “painful,” never finding it “enjoyable or comforting or fulfilling” she decides to go the DIY route of artificial insemination with a sperm donor. The remainder of the novel goes back and forth between her life as a writer and her aspirations for motherhood.
In conversations with female colleagues and friends she ponders the nature of her conditions. For the most part, love is absent from the novel. While continuing to develop as a writer, Natsuko provides clinical details of the donor process and its subsequent consequences for the resultant children.
The closest the novel comes to a polemic is when her two passions converge. She is advised to “’write about yourself … about your sexuality, your finances, your emotions… if you can get pregnant on your own and become a mother — or even if you can’t — but if you write about everything that happens in the process, do you have any idea how much that would mean to so many women?’” She’s encouraged to “’give women something real. Real hope. Precedent. Empowerment. You don’t need a partner. A woman can make the decision to have a child and go through with it alone.’”
And that’s what Natsuko does. In essence, Breasts and Eggs is that book. It sometimes sags as she researches medical choices, attending symposiums and conferences. One of them introduces her to Jun, the prime force of a group called Children of Donors. He carries his own life-defining baggage which he shares with Natsuko.
There is a great deal of food and drink consumed in the novel, especially beer and mugicha tea. The barley beverage can serve as another metaphor for the psychological nature of the novel. A fresh mug (whether served hot or cold) has a toasty flavor with slightly bitter undertones.