Breasts and Eggs

Kawakami has had a fascinating career. Bar hostess, pop singer, blogger, celebrity and celebrated author, winner of Japan’s most prestigious literature award . It’s like if Ariana Grande suddenly wrote a Pulitzer prize winning novel. This particular book won the Akutagawa Prize in 2007 and I’m surprised its taken 13 years to translate into English. Kawakami can write – that much is clear. Her observations and descriptions of walking in a subway station or sitting in a noodle shop or riding a ferris wheel at dusk or returning to the apartment building you grew up in as a child are beautiful and vivid. The whole book is filled with wonderful descriptions that are fun to read and give the story firm grounding in the real world – a problem with much of Murakami’s work, to which Kawakami has been compared. I don’t think its a fair or accurate comparison. Murakami’s work is too different and abstract compared to Kawakami. So the book is fun to read and pages turn quickly, but my problem is with the way Kawakami distills down the entire human female experience to just two things – appearance and reproduction. Perhaps it’s the fault of the translation, but all the characters speak with the same voice. Another problem is the way the book is organized – there are actually two books, the first dealing with appearances (the narrator’s older sister is considering breast implants) and the second dealing with the narrator’s exploration of the world of artificial insemination. The first book ends abruptly with no resolution or really any conclusion. The second book concludes but doesn’t resolve anything. I was disappointed by the lack of any sort of examination of the character’s lives outside of their quest for body modification or their obsessive investigation into sperm donation and implantation. I think the Akutagawa reviewers were suckered in by pretty descriptions of morning sun and snow and eating ramen and walking near the ocean or maybe 2007 was just a really thin year for submissions – either way, there are a lot of problems with this book not the least being a meandering narrative with a number of unresolved plotlines. I’ll read another book by Kawakami because she writes well, not because she is a great writer.

This is an engrossing first-person novel exploring the dark side of being a woman in modern Japan, and indeed in many other cultures, too.

There are some artistic problems, though: as one reviewer pointed out, this novel is actually two only peripherally related stories which are sort-of stuck together…

But what irritates me the most is the title and the translation. `Breasts and Eggs’ is a strange title – yes, the first of the two stories concerns breasts, but the second concerns sperm, not eggs. In fact, my Kindle edition states that the title of the original Japanese book is Natsumonogatari, which means Summer Tales (there are various`summer’ references in the novel – the narrator’s name, most of the action occurs during the summer,
etc. …). However, I also see a Japanese version on Amazon with the title which literally translates to `Breasts and Eggs’, so it’s not clear what’s going on – maybe the original Japanese was retitled to something more attention-grabbing?

But the most annoying thing is the English translation: it does read smoothly, but it contains a number of grade-school level English mistakes like `I felt like laying down’ and `me and my sister’. Horrifying! I haven’t read the Japanese original, but I find it hard to imagine that given that the narrator is supposed to be a novelist, she would make the Japanese equivalent of such grammatical mistakes! What on earth do editors do these days to earn their pay ?

The book is: Kawakami Mieko, Breasts and Eggs (Tr., Sam Bett and David Boyd, Europa Editions, NY, ISBN 9781609455880, Authors copyright 2019; Translation 2020), Kindle Edition.

Mieko Kawakami is a writer who does not shrink in the face of very, very hard truths and who captures whole the inner life of persons with tight, economic prose.

Ms. Kawakamis writing is a miracle of description, and one feels less like a reader than one who is right there with human suffering, spiritual striving, death and the most beautiful description yet of the agony and joy of birthing, a tour de force.

Some of the most tragic moments are monstrous in the miraculous sense of rivaling the hilarity and obscenity of Philip Roths Sabbath Theater.

Ms. Kawakami explores philosophical issues in depth citing leading epistemologists that I will read now, having completed this truly great novel.

This is my first reading of Kawakami, but will go on to make a study of her great work.

It’s hard to know if my issues with Breasts and Eggs are because the story is translated from Japanese. Clearly, the “Osaka dialect” is not apparent in a written translation. Nor is it clear why the narrator’s name is so peculiar that people assume it’s a pen name.
The writing style is tedious. I have never read so many six-word sentences in one novel. It feels like the author was paid by the full stop and the word. There are endless, gratuitous phrases, apparently tossed in for no good reason, e.g. “I brought my food contribution in a Tupperware container I had bought from the 100 yen shop” or “We walked along side by side. He was on the left and I was on the right”. WHO CARES?
The only reason I finished the book is to be ready to discuss it at book club tonight. If anyone at book club likes this book, I will be very suspicious of any new books they recommend.

If you are looking for a heavily-plotted story, this probably isnt for you, as the novel unfolds at a gradual pace and contains many digressions mostly in the form of anecdotes told by characters as they meet Natsu in a vivid assortment of Tokyo locations. Although it may seem as if not much is happening, there are weighty questions about birth and death, loneliness, grief and the place of women in contemporary society bubbling just beneath the surface of the story. There is something uniquely beautiful about the ever-shifting mood of the novel as it undulates between joy and sadness, resistance and acceptance, alienation and intimacy. Natsu is constantly seeking answers and searching for the meaning of her life, and womens lives, at a time when we are freer to make our own choices than we have ever been before.

The patriarchy is a character always hovering ominously in the background; although the story is based almost entirely around women, there are flashes of male violence and hints of the emotional damage left by men, including Natsus father. There are good male characters too, most of whom appear near the end of Book Two, but their inclusion is purely functional and if anything, weakens the story. This is perhaps because the feminist core of the novel is so powerful that it obliterates any hope for strong male character development.

Visually and emotionally, Breasts and Eggs is a breath-taking exploration of the female experience, filled with acute questions on the nature of birth, life and death but easily digestible thanks to its dreamy, laid-back pacing. Even its flaws like the unevenness in tone and few-too-many digressions add something to its uniqueness; it couldve been streamlined to be more cohesive but would have lost some of its charm in the process. In essence, it is a book about spiritual growth and the associated pain that comes with it, told through vivid characters and situations grounded in profound truth. narrator-blog.com

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