'BREASTS AND EGGS' by Mieko Kawakami

Mieko Kawakami’s novel ‘Breasts and Eggs’ delivers what it promises: it talks about breasts and about eggs – the eggs you can eat and the eggs found in women’s ovaries, waiting and ready to be fertilised at the right time of the cycle.

The book has been successful, becoming one of TIME’s best ten books of 2020.

Kawakami, an extraordinarily beautiful 45-year-old writer (born in Osaka and now living in Tokyo) is also a poet and a short story writer and has already received numerous literary awards in Japan for her work.

The novel is divided in two books.

Book 1 sees thirty-one-year-old Natsuko (the protagonist), who lives in a poor suburb of Tokyo, visited by her sister Makiko and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko has come to Tokyo to try and regain some of her lost youth and good looks by having breast surgery. She’s also willing to endure the pain caused by a cream she applies to her nipples to try and lighten their colour, as she believes that only pink/light coloured nipples are beautiful. Her daughter has recently stopped speaking. Midoriko’s silence becomes the background for the surreal interaction and relationships that play out in Natsuko’s rundown apartment in the sweltering Tokyo heat. It all reads effortlessly and beautifully, but it’s like an odyssey that’s going nowhere, it remains in the apartment, although, at the same time it reaches into the women’s past, their circumstances, lives and identities. It depicts an impression that is brutally, ferociously real – a poor woman’s world, without windows, without doors – no exit. Yet, there’s an undercurrent of comedy exemplified by an unforgettable scene in Natsuko’s kitchen involving a lot of eggs from her fridge. It is funny, absurd, symbolic and cathartic. In the midst of misery, it makes the reader laugh. In the midst of misery, the women accept each other and bond. In the midst of misery, they manage to love each other, in their own imperfect, weird, ridiculous way. On the verge of self-destruction, they show us what it is to be women, to be poor women, to be modern day women in a society created and managed by men.

Book 2 takes place eight years later and is mainly the story of Natsuko, now a writer, who is nearing forty and is contemplating having a child via sperm donation, as she is not able to have sex. Not being able to have sex has resulted in her losing the man she loved, but this introduces an interesting topic – the fact that sometimes for women there can be a complete disconnect between sex and love and this lack of wanting sex, in her case, sets the protagonist free. Natsuko then stumbles upon a group of people that is opposed to sperm donation, on the grounds that a child should have the right to know who their biological father is. What ensues is an interesting exploration of this contemporary issue, whereby Kawakami is able to show the reader both sides of the argument with a faultless writing that flows from the author like a river punctuated here and there by understated notes of brilliance, so demure and integral to the text, that you’ll miss them if you blink. Interestingly, in the second book a grown up Midoriko can now talk and has a boyfriend. This remains a bit of a loose end in the story, as no explanation is given.

My view is that Kawakami has written a book for women, unashamedly just for women and only about women. It’s about the workings of their bodies, as well as the complex and mysterious relations between them. The author appears to draw from her lived experience, as her work definitely aims (and in my opinion succeeds) to be liberating, to reveal real women stripped of religious and societal norms. It pits the ethics of traditional Japanese culture against those of a modern technological society and tries to understand how women can exist in this male dominated conflict. It shows that poverty and being female are forever linked – something that transcends nationality and ethnicity. Her story suggests that being woman can be subversive and disruptive in a patriarchal world crumbling under the weight of its own power.

‘Breasts and Eggs’ is a book from the heart and for the heart, for honouring the female body and the female essence, it is not for the mind with its rational constraints. This novel is a successful combination of passion and grace; like a baby, it is born and occupies a space in the world. Like a baby, its naked honesty makes it important, a significant piece of contemporary literature, one where symbolisms are ripe, one that shouts its presence into an unsuspecting world. It delivers a gift only a woman can give – permission for women to finally reclaim their own bodies, their own selves. It assertively and emphatically concludes with an indisputable truth: only women can give life.

I see this novel as a fearless, messy and at times funny celebration of the female.

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