If you bring a new life into the world, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re waking one of these kids up. You know what makes you think doing that’s okay? Because it’s got nothing to do with you.” Interspersed with Natsuko's narrative in this first part of the novel are excerpts from this journal, which Natsuko comes to read, giving more insight into what is going on in Midoriko's head -- a lot of which has to do with what is going on with her body.

Natsuko still lives in Tokyo, is still in touch with her sister and niece (though they exist only at the periphery this time around), and she has finally found herself where she wants to be: paid to read and to write full-time. Fiction Book Review: Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, trans. from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd". Publishers Weekly. 19 March 2020 . Retrieved 22 October 2020. Meanwhile, Midoriko’s journal betrays her fear and outrage at the concept and the biology of womanhood, and how it defines the modern woman. Midoriko scrawls with white hot aggression about menstruation, breast growth, and child bearing.

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Amidst all of this is Natsuko, who watches it all unfold from a place of relative calm and quiet. Natsuko is well defined in her own right but far less aggressively compelling as her sister and niece, which is an asset to the success of the story. On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by her daughter, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsuko’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another. She is now a rising star in the English language, too, thanks to translations of works like Ms. Ice Sandwich from Pushkin Press (tr. Louise Heal Kawai) and, now, Breasts and Eggs from Picador (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd) and Europa Additions.

Ironically, Kawakami herself has defended Murakami’s fictional females. In the superb essay “Acts of Recognition: On the Women Characters of Haruki Murakami”, Kawakami offers a fierce defense of Murakami’s characters, arguing that Murakami was among the first Japanese male writers whose “women are people.” (She also engages this theme in a fascinating one-on-one interview between her and Murakami – “A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself”. They can't do anything around the house without making a ton of noise, not even close the fridge or turn the lights on. As a reader who is progressively identifying with, and adhering to, their own gender less and less, this resonated with me in a loud and powerful way. Natsuko's dad was a hopeless case, and Makiko's marriage fell apart before their child was even born.In the eight years separating the first and second parts of the novel Natsuko has enjoyed some success as an author, publishing a book that became a surprise success (where everyone dies -- but keeps on living ...). The translation is mostly solid, though there are occasional ... unusual choices (most notably: tchotchke, which surely has no place in any Japanese novel not set in a Jewish milieu). Kawakami systematically up-ends all of these tropes, and the reader barely sees it coming. Her main character is asexual. Although she enjoys emotional and intellectual intimacy with men, she finds sex and sexual intimacy unpleasant. However much asexuality may be trending in the academic sphere, we have yet to see many mainstream novels with asexual main characters, and Natsuko is a beautifully complex, compelling and sympathetic character.

In Book One, we see the world through the eyes of Natsuko, a thirty-year-old woman living alone in a Tokyo apartment and working tirelessly in her spare time to become an author. Poverty, and the cycle of poverty, are a significant theme especially in this first part of the novel. Challenging every preconception about storytelling and prose style, mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, Kawakami is today one of Japan’s most important and best-selling writers. She exploded onto the cultural scene first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and is now an award-winning novelist. Translation as an Exercise in Letting Go - An Interview with Sam Bett and David Boyd on Translating Mieko Kawakami

What renders this work magnificent is its detailed attention to the inner voice, a focus Kawakami shares with other well-known contemporary writers from Japan. A host of bestselling authors — Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami, Kazuki Kaneshiro, Yu Miri, Sayaka Murata, Hiromi Kawakami, and others, all of whom have work translated into English — have grappled in different and rewarding ways with this perspective. While Murakami’s work probes more fantastical terrain, it often takes as its point of departure the banality of the everyday, elevating protagonists’ experience of the everyday into otherworldly fantasias. She leads a relatively isolated life, occasionally meeting old co-workers (all women) or her editor (a woman), and she remains in touch with her sister and niece (but mainly via phone and text), but basically on her own. Even if it turns out that I don't have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there's nothing I can do about this feeling.