...a moving, messy aria of supremely female grief-letting that sees love and rage mingled up like cracked yolks and shell ... These females bleed and breed, they get drunk and bleach their nipples, they seek breast implants and sperm donors, and, most horrifying of all, it’s possible they might find single motherhood a completely satisfying state of affairs ..there is something fundamentally girlish—that is to say ingenuous and hence disarming—about [Kawakami's] writing. It makes sense that she was a blogger before she became a famous author; the novel is gratifyingly artless, delivered in a frank and funny prose that shines with unselfconsciousness and a kind of flat-footed grace.
Breasts and Eggs will appeal to readers who delight in finding the female intellect prioritized on the page; if you like Sheila Heti, you'll love Mieko Kawakami ... combines conversational and structural looseness with a bracing, exacting reflection on the fundamental strangeness of having a female body ... Her voice and concerns are so vibrant and present she practically levitates from the page; long after I finished Breasts and Eggs, Natsuko has remained with me, like a distant friend.
Like Murakami—who has enthusiastically endorsed her work—she too has a loose and colloquial style. But unlike her forebear, Kawakami writes with a bracing lack of sentimentality, particularly when describing the lives of women ... Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body — its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions. And she is especially good at capturing its longings, those in this novel being at once obsessive and inchoate, and in one way or another about transformation ... Kawakami’s prose is supple and casual, unbothered with the kinds of sentences routinely described as 'luminous.' But into these stretches of plain speech she regularly drops phrases that made me giddy with pleasure ... skillful translation.
Breasts and Eggs...is very (female-)body focused ... The treatment of male figures is a bit more complicated, as Kawakami, like Natsuko, isn't all too sure of what to do with them, unable to find much that they're good for; mostly, they're simply non-presences -- though there's some harsh male-bashing slipped in along the way ... Breasts and Eggs is an odd work, in many respects, but mostly quite winning; it's maybe a bit much Kawakami stuffs in here, but it comes together quite satisfyingly. Certainly, the quirkiness of the presentation of the ideas -- mainly in the normalcy with which they are treated...is appealing ... weird in a good way.
Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a true novel of two halves and is (excuse the pun) a bit of a curate’s egg ... The first book is excellent, a rough-edged drama that is both hilarious and tragic, and tinged with surreality. The second is a little flat by contrast, and the juxtaposition feels forced ... The body in Breasts and Eggs is almost exclusively female. Most of the narratives are told by women, and all but one of the main characters is female. In the first half of the text, men are only there to be run away from, and in the second half, men only seem to exist as a means by which to provide sperm, but in an almost exclusively non-sexual context. When sex comes into it, it is almost horrific. It is a focus which gives the book as a whole its strength, allowing women to talk amongst themselves, navigating the policing of the female body by men and society as a whole in a space apart ... The novel gives birth, but never loses its sense of being the story of a woman’s body. The dislocations and dissociations along the way are sometimes jarring and feel like they don’t wholly work, but the unifying factor of the female body saves a book that feels as necessary as it is at times awkward.
Reading Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs, one experiences the pain of women coming to terms with what they do and don’t want, almost too acutely ... the novel initially seems to be laser-focused on two of the most blandly traditional wants that women are still expected to foster: first, the desire to be sexually attractive, and second, the desire to have a baby ... Its critical engagement with those desires enters via the sharp-eyed detachment of the narrator ... The novel works to make all of its readers feel the fundamental strangeness of inhabiting the cis-female body during the interval of its supposed biological utility, between adolescence and menopause. The clinical detail with which Kawakami’s characters discuss breast augmentation surgery or the proper usage of sanitary pads makes the female body a disconcertingly alien entity, estranged even from those of us who live in one ... The book’s distanced, occasionally disgusted view of the female form dances between body horror and bawdy humor ... Kawakami’s [has the] knack of shifting registers with lightning speed ... Enigmatic scenes...are scattered throughout the novel, giving a bizarre and fantastical edge to its otherwise dryly realistic account ... The contrast between will and desire is vague but suggestive; it seems that in moving from one to the other, the issue becomes not what women want, but what women do ... Yet the novel does not present a facile, unifying theory of womanhood. Class divisions between women are foregrounded, as the novel’s halves begin with confrontational questions ... This intensity of address forces readers to define themselves in direct relation to the lives of women depicted in the novel—an uncomfortable demand that left me feeling at once far too close, and far too far, from Natsu and her experience of the world ... Kawakami’s prose...can feel as shallow or as deep as you want it to be ... I found this tone hard to parse; I laughed out loud in moments when I wasn’t sure if I should laugh, and didn’t laugh at times that seemed the most conventionally humorous ... The novel leaves us wondering ... One might see in this a kind of hopefulness. Or a kind of despair. Or maybe they are the same feeling.
... 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 ... 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 ... But it can also be flat, thickened and slowed by banal repetitions in Sam Bett’s less-than-invigorating translation ... 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 ... the novel ends on an optimistic note, with Kawakami’s downbeat heroine finally embracing—in every sense—new life.
If the pulsing center of the story is hard to find, it’s because there isn’t one exactly. Kawakami, like Natsu herself, creates a literary form that bears witness to the many stories and hardships of working-class and single women ... The novel is at its most beautiful and urgent when it presses toward such crystalline epiphanies, even if the story runs out of steam or reaches a conclusion that seems forced or sentimental. Occasionally, the narrative pauses, and in turn makes the reader pause, breathless{.]
Beyond the linguistic sleight-of-hand of the title, the translators have a knack for wordplay which makes a non-Japanese speaker marvel at the process ... Kawakami threads these themes of self-actualization, maternal purpose and responsibility, and the life of an artist in a way that reveals the texture of everyday life—the chance meetings that can result in commonplace and profound reflections—and is soul-stirring.
Which is the greater triumph, struggle and cost — giving birth to a child or to a novel? There’s nothing new, perhaps, in this question. But there’s everything new in the fearless way it is explored in Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs ... unsentimental clarity ... intense and provocative, an intellectual thriller. But a breeziness of delivery, translated in books one and two by Sam Bett and David Boyd respectively, makes for a light-on-its-feet read. Kawakami is a writer who alchemises the banal into a kind of musical poetry ... Kawakami toys with the reader; at every turn there’s a friend or colleague taking a different position on writing and motherhood ... While the finale is decisive, Breasts and Eggs remains a stunning work of iridescence, changing with the light. For good reason this promises to be one of the most talked-about novels of the year.
Novelist and politician Shintaro Ishihara described Breasts and Eggs as 'unpleasant and intolerable', which might be another way to say that it is not afraid of sperm, used menstrual pads, poverty and the working poor. Natsuko’s language, as translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is actually quite polite. I had the feeling of listening to someone speaking in the dark: casual intimacies interspersed with fanciful, terrifying and dreamlike interludes ... Section one is compact and ferocious ... Section two, the bulk of the book, is digressive and reflective ... In Bett and Boyd’s translation, Kawakami’s feminism is vivid, but the language occasionally feels placid; meanwhile, in Kawai’s translation, feminism and language collide in a way that feels deliciously irreverent.
Kawakami delicately balances her character’s tentative reproductive desires with the societal structures and dissenting perspectives that surround her ... Yet the ending is hardly tidy. The entire book is shaggy, and readers seeking neat closure should stay away. Kawakami leans into her digressive structure, trusting that if her narrator is singular and compelling enough, the reader will follow her wherever she goes. Personally, I eagerly awaited each decision Natsuko made, each meandering conversation she pursued, and each side character—from an endearing scammer named Kewpie to a screaming reflexologist—she introduced. This structure also enjoys a strange resonance with Kawakami’s motifs. There are many ways to be a woman, and many paths are worth wandering until, suddenly, they’re not.
... a capacious, contrary novel about pregnancy which is inflected with anti-natalist ideas ... Poverty, menstruation and childbearing are depicted as entrapping cycles, reinforced by Natsuko’s painful memories of her and her sister’s childhood ... Makiko’s stories about work draw a vivid picture of male privilege and the costs and demands of low-paid, physical labour on the body. Kawakami’s depiction of exhausting work made tolerable by female friendship recalls that of Natsuo Kirino’s Out, a superb thriller set on the night shift in a packaging factory in Tokyo, although Breasts and Eggs doesn’t take the same murderous direction. Like Makiko, the women who end up working at the bar must invest more money into staying there as their bodies and faces age, spending money on plastic surgery with their diminishing pay ... Kawakami is largely uninterested in exploring conflicts between the processes of art and mothering ... As is typical of this strange and unwieldy book, we’re presented with the most complicated and radical positions just as the narrative veers towards a less challenging and somewhat neat denouement.
I mean, what does feeling like a woman actually entail?' asks the narrator of Breasts and Eggs , Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami’s astute, progressive reflection on womanhood. It is a question at the heart of this book, which radically examines the female form and psyche. It is also one to which, Kawakami suggests, there is no simple answer ... It can be hard going but there is something rewarding in persevering through these latter pages, where you will discover lucid moments of insight ... Ultimately, Breasts and Eggs is bold and refreshing – a story of female empowerment, of living without men and male conventions. While the space the novel occupies is very Japanese, its themes are universal.
While a relatively quiet and straightforward read, Breasts and Eggs left me breathless. Mere sentences or gestures crescendo and transform the entire scene and its characters. Perhaps of all its themes, the novel delves most deeply into the nature of feminism and femininity, questioning what exactly makes a woman a woman. Kawakami describes various facets of the female body, outward and inward. These physical features, of course, are only the beginning of the nuanced depictions of womanhood that the novel explores. Though most of the novel is told through Natsuko’s eyes, Kawakami subtly shifts observations and conversations to women of varying ages which, overall, gives readers a broad scope of a woman’s entire life from puberty to death ... Breasts and Eggs masterfully poses hard truths that women everyday, everywhere wrestle with. Is my body good enough? Am I good enough? What do people think of me? What kind of mother will I be? Am I turning into my mother? While feminism should be, at its core, a fight to prove that women are as valuable as men, we all know the conversation doesn’t and shouldn’t end there. Kawakami stares its female readers in the face and promises that no matter what your journey, it’s a worthy one. For that alone, her novel is well worth the read.
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 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.
...one of the most remarkable feminist novels to appear in the English language ... Its unobtrusive plot masks a work of remarkable complexity that launches a radical challenge to both the political and literary status quo ... What renders this work magnificent is its detailed attention to the inner voice ... Fantasy and magic realism are used to further refine that sense of self, as it processes and assimilates the most fantastical of external stimuli. It helps the reader – as well as the protagonist – to winnow an identity down to its essence. This sense of self-understanding, and whatever personal growth it entails, is the goal consistently sought in these stories; its achievement the denouement and reward for both reader and protagonist alike ... The story is a delightful breath of fresh air that scoffs at faux feminist literature – that ubiquitous genre which gently criticizes misogyny while taking care not to venture, in the end, too far from heterocentric and androcentric tropes. In these norm-plagued novels, the protagonists always include some iteration of a heteronormative couple that winds up together ... Kawakami writes with a remarkable frankness grounded in bodily experience and emotional honesty ... Fearless in its demand for accountability, transcendent in its honesty, it breathes life into feminist literature and throws down a gauntlet for other writers to aspire toward.
Breasts and Eggs is packed with information on artificial insemination and much more, but it is far from dreary. Something of a feminist icon, Kawakami punctuates her novel with humour, irony, and unexpected forays into tragi-comic farce ... Drawing on her own experiences as a single woman and writer, Kawakami depicts the loneliness of individuals, women and men, and their battles for survival. It is a depiction that has not surprisingly struck a chord with many young women, moving them to tears at readings.
Breasts and Eggs is quirky and, at times, suddenly and unexpectedly dark. It also deals with detailed accounts of things which most novels do not – female urinary tract issues, menstruation and sex ... The first-person narrative and high proportion of dialoguemakes the pace snappy and the story easy to read. The second part has a more mature writing style, which is perhaps not a surprise, given it was written nearly a decade after the first. However, this doesn’t detract from the flow of the novel as a whole. Rather, it highlights the differences between Natsuko and Makiko, and the different problems they face.
... they feel like two different books rather than two parts of the same story ... The first book is stronger, tighter and stranger ... intense and surprising, and falls outside some of the recent trends seen in Japanese fiction published in English, where tales of quiet restraint, kawaii (cuteness) and the uncanny are more often seen ... there is internal tension, a sense of a race against time and sharp emotional stakes, yet the story remains oddly uninvolving, perhaps because it’s delivered in such a flat tone, with nondescript details and cliches ... Much of this story involves her speaking to other people and listening to their views, which although interesting, give the narrative a second-hand feel, like reportage or notes toward a novel rather than lived experience ... It’s this clash between lack of oomph and leisurely length that makes the second story in Breasts and Eggs less engaging than the first. Which is not to say that it’s never entertaining ... Terrible people make good reading, but comparing the punchy first story here with the second story brings another cliche to mind: less is more.
The story, told through Natsuko, explores the ways in which women rebel against social norms in Japan and the relationships between sisters as well as mother and daughter ... Author Kawakami displays a deft satirical touch in a scene in which a pudgy man with a wart, who claims his sperm is in the top percentile, offers to grease Natsuko's quest to be a mother, including the option of "skin to skin" delivery of his sperm. The translators have captured the musicality of Kawakami's prose, though it is hard to discern if they have managed to preserve the original's Osaka dialect ... Leavened by some comic moments, Breasts And Eggs is an ambitious work that takes a good crack at interrogating what makes a woman a woman and the precariousness of a woman's existence.
Japan’s literary superstar Kawakami...significantly expands her 2008 Akutagawa Prize novella, notably translated by Bett and Boyd ... Within an affecting portrait-of-an-artist-in-transition, Kawakami deftly, deeply questions the assumptions of womanhood and family—the bonds and abuses, expectations and betrayals, choices and denials.
An audience outside of Japan probably doesn’t know Kawakami from her career as a pop singer, nor will they have experienced her writing as a blogger—this novel began as blog posts written more than a decade ago. So, what will readers encounter in this newly published translation? A novel about women figuring out how they want to be women ... Kawakami’s style is sometimes funny, occasionally absurd, and mostly flat—at least in translation and in novel form ... It’s hard to know who the audience for this translation is supposed to be.
...stirring if uneven ... the first half of Kawakami’s narrative is bracing and evocative, tender yet unflinching in depicting the relationship between the sisters and between mother and daughter. Unfortunately, the second half, set 10 years later, falters ... Though Natsu remains an empathetic character, the second part of the book feels overlong and chatty. Kawakami’s talent is obvious, though readers may want to stop after Book One, while they’re ahead.
