Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami review – strange and ruthlessly honest
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.
But then, the book itself is a funny sort of whole: Breasts and Eggs is in two parts, with different translators. The first began life as a blog before being turned into the original acclaimed novella, while the second part was added a decade later.
Both parts are told by Natsuko, a working-class woman from Osaka, living in Tokyo. In the first, she’s a struggling writer, visited by her sister, Makiko, a bar hostess who, as her body ages and she approaches the age at which their mother died from breast cancer, has become obsessed with having a boob job. Her teenage daughter, Midoriko, has stopped talking to her; the reader is privy to Midoriko’s diary entries, expressing revulsion at how her body is changing during puberty.
Not much happens until a brilliant final confrontation featuring a fridgeful of eggs, but Kawakami wraps the reader in a stifling claustrophobia. Her writing is sometimes beguilingly strange and peppered with evocative imagery (“sunlight pinched our skin”; strips of cloud are like “marks left by a tired finger”). But it can also be flat, thickened and slowed by banal repetitions in Sam Bett’s less-than-invigorating translation.
Related: Mieko Kawakami: 'Women are no longer content to shut up'
The longer second part revisits Natsuko 10 years later: she’s achieved a similar sudden literary success to her author, but is struggling to write a second novel and increasingly isolated. She yearns to have a child, but the thought of sex makes her “want to die”, so she investigates using a sperm donor, only to discover in Japan it’s a process only available for infertile couples, not single women.
Things continue at a drifty pace, the novel largely made up of Natsuko’s occasional interactions with women who offer differing takes on motherhood. David Boyd’s translation seems to reflect Kawakami’s smoother control over her material, although there’s some heavy-handed exposition and the curiously detached Natsuko doesn’t always make for a thrilling narrator. Her days pass “like a row of white boxes, all lined up, the same shape and the same weight”. But Kawakami writes with ruthless honesty about the bodily experience of being a woman, from menstrual leaks to painful nipples. She carefully reveals how poverty exacerbates the suffocating pressures on women within a society where “prettiness means value”. The mysteries of procreation hold both anxiety and allure across the two parts, although Kawakami remains thoroughly unsentimental – motherhood can be “miraculous”, but it can also be oppressive. Two separate characters even suggest that to give birth is a selfish act of violence, an argument pursued with fearlessness, given voice both in teenage nihilism (“why did any of us have to be born?”) and via an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, convinced that the only way to be sure you don’t inflict “excruciating pain” on an innocent child is to not have one.
Ultimately, however, Natsuko rejects these fears and the novel ends on an optimistic note, with Kawakami’s downbeat heroine finally embracing – in every sense – new life.
• Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is published by Picador (£15.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
