In contrast to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy or Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Kawakami is largely uninterested in exploring conflicts between the processes of art and mothering. Natsuko’s otherwise supportive editor Sengawa, a happily single and child-free woman, warns her: ‘Look at all the novels women writers publish once they’re mothers. They’re all about how hard it is to have kids and to raise them. Then they’re weirdly grateful about it all, too… Authors can’t afford to have middle-class values.’ Breasts and Eggs forms a critique of the idea that novels centred on motherhood are likely to be bourgeois and limited in their preoccupations, offering a vivid account of working-class life; in its aesthetic, it is closer to Yuko Tsushima’s impressionistic and yet gritty account of single motherhood Territory of Light than it is to any recent Western novels. Kawakami is clearly far more interested in how relationships between women play out in patriarchal capitalist society than she is in exploring the structure of that patriarchy, even as the women she depicts share experiences of unhappy marriages, divorce and flight from men. This is even more striking in the second half of the novel, where we get a prismatic view of mothering, pregnancy and domestic life through Natsuko’s discussions with various sets of (notably exclusively heterosexual and cis) women acquaintances. Great swathes of time are compressed in these shared stories of childhood, marriage, and childbirth, from women variously single, divorced and unhappily married, facing down the same societal forces, even as their lives depart from each other because of children and work. Yuriko: Imagine you’re at the edge of a forest, right before dawn… After walking for a while, you come to a small house… Inside, you find ten sleeping children.” … Certainly, the quirkiness of the presentation of the ideas -- mainly in the normalcy with which they are treated (Natsuko isn't really hung-up on anything, like most protagonists in her position would be, especially regarding sex) -- is appealing. She's trying to find herself -- who she is, as a woman and in general -- and most of Breasts and Eggs has her trying to figure that out. 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. (...) Kawakami writes with ruthless honesty about the bodily experience of being a woman" - Holly Williams, The Guardian

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.What all these authors share is a mastery over the interior voice. Time is languorous in their work; secondary characters come and go. Narratives are rarely straightforward, either in terms of plot or chronology. Everything is rendered secondary to development of the main character, and the process(es) they are dealing with — healing, growth, change, reconciliation.

Writer and then-governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, who himself won the Akutagawa Prize in 1955 and was a sitting member of its selection committee, criticized the selection of Kawakami's novel for the prize. In Bungeishunjū he wrote, "The egocentric, self-absorbed rambling of the work is unpleasant and intolerable." [19] English translation [ edit ] Natsuko's isn't a question of gender-confusion -- that isn't the issue -- but she still struggles to figure out her identity as a woman, whereby societal pressure, of lineage, and the roles of sons and daughters within the family, play a significant part. Translation as an Exercise in Letting Go - An Interview with Sam Bett and David Boyd on Translating Mieko Kawakami

October 2014

And even Midoriko -- not even a teen yet -- understands how hard her mother has it, and struggles with her own inability to be a support beyond her years:

The English translation is divided in two parts and is narrated by Natsuko Natsume (夏子 Natsuko), an aspiring writer in Tokyo. In the first part, Natsuko's sister, Makiko (巻子), and her 12-year-old daughter, Midoriko (緑子), arrive in Tokyo from Osaka. Makiko has come to Tokyo seeking a clinic for breast augmentation. Midoriko has not spoken to her mother in six months. Midoriko's journal entries are interspersed and contain her thoughts about becoming a woman and recognizing the changes in her body. In the second part, set years later, Natsuko contemplates becoming a mother and the options open to her as an older single woman in Japan.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. What does being a mother mean? Who has the right to bring a life into this world? Is motherhood a selfish act and, if it is, is it wrong to be selfish? What does a child feel about being born? These were the questions Breasts and Eggs forced me to think about. HR: Let’s talk about the logistics of undertaking a translation project as a team. Are both of your hands on every word, do you somehow divide up the work? Is this your first paired translation project? DB: I can see that, especially in Heaven. Mieko’s sentences have a way of coming together to form something larger, something that can be really hard to define. Even if the effect isn’t most obvious at the sentence level, that’s where a lot of attention and effort goes when translating. Mieko’s sentences often contain “too much” or “too little,” by English standards, and I’m happy to follow the structure of the original wherever possible. I suppose I’m worried, actually, that changing things at the sentence level would negatively impact the exact thing you’re talking about. The issue of womanhood is more universal, and Kawakami's take is particularly intriguing with her de-sexualized protagonist.

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. 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. If Book One was a photograph or a haiku, Book Two is a film or a sonnet. We still follow Natsuko, but almost a decade has passed and she is now a published author. DB: There are so many things that connect these two books, but—personally—it’s the differences that really stand out. Whether it’s a cotranslation or not, as a translator, I’m always worried about being too comfortable with an author I’ve already translated, or seeing stylistic continuities that aren’t there. There are so many sides to Mieko’s writing, and it’s important that we do justice to that. When we were working on the translation, we spoke about similarities that we’d noticed between the books. I think that our ability to have that kind of conversation guaranteed that we wouldn’t revert to the ways we’d done things in a prior project.Breasts and Eggs was translated by men. One cannot help but wonder how different it would have been if a woman had translated it. She's also saved enough that she could raise a child, so at least financially it wouldn't be crushing hardship (as it was for her mother).