Aside from the people coming in and out or simply walking by, you’ll find people slumped down motionless under the payphones, women who looked well into their sixties promising dances for 2,000 yen, and no shortage of vagrants and drunks, but you’ll also find the whole of Osaka. Shobashi comes alive at night. From appearances, it’s a dump. And from sundown to sun-up, on the third floor of a building throbbing with karaoke reverb, you’ll find the bar where Makiko works, five nights a week, from seven until around midnight. Thirty-year-old Natsu lives in Tokyo, having moved from Osaka to pursue her dream to be a writer, when her sister Makiko and young niece Midoriko come to visit. But this isn’t a typical family reunion—in Mieko Kawakami’s novel, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, Makiko is in town to find a clinic for a breast enhancement procedure and, for reasons she can’t quite understand, her daughter has recently stopped speaking to her. In Midoriko’s silence, the women become attuned to their own fears related to growing older and their changing bodies. It’s a sharply observed and heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a woman, in Japan and beyond. The second half of the novel finds the characters still grappling with these struggles 10 years later. In describing Natsu’s life as a childless woman at odds with an identity she did not anticipate, the novel highlights the anxieties that accompany contemporary womanhood in aching and wonderfully absurd terms. I used one of your towels, she said, patting her hair dry. When I saw her with all her makeup off, I felt a little better. On the platform, I felt like I wasn’t even seeing my own sister. What a relief. I’d thought she was a walking skeleton, but she wasn’t half as skinny as I’d thought. She’d worn the wrong foundation, and way too much of it. No wonder she looked pale. Maybe she hadn’t really changed that much. It’s just that it had been so long since I had seen her. Maybe I overreacted. It had sure been a surprise, but everyone grows old, and I started thinking that maybe she looked her age after all. Kawakami, who exploded into the cultural space first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and most importantly as a best-selling novelist, challenges every preconception about storytelling and prose style. She is currently one of Japan’s most widely read and critically acclaimed authors, heralded by Haruki Murakami as his favorite young writer. An earlier novella published in Japan with the same title focused on the female body, telling the story of three women: the thirty-year-old unmarried narrator, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter Midoriko. Unable to come to terms with her changed body after giving birth, Makiko becomes obsessed with the prospect of getting breast enhancement surgery. Meanwhile, her twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko is paralyzed by the fear of her oncoming puberty and finds herself unable to voice the vague, yet overwhelming anxieties associated with growing up. The narrator, who remains unnamed for most of the story, struggles with her own indeterminable identity of being neither a “daughter” nor a “mother.” Set over three stiflingly hot days in Tokyo, the book tells of a reunion of sorts, between two sisters, and the passage into womanhood of young Midoriko. In this greatly expanded version, a second chapter in the story of the same women opens on another hot summer’s day ten years later. The narrator, single and childless, having reconciled herself with the idea of never marrying, nonetheless feels increasing anxiety about growing old alone and about never being a mother. In episodes that are as comical as they are revealing of deep yearning, she seeks direction from other women in her life—her mother, her grandmother, friends, as well as her sister—and only after dramatic and frequent changes of heart, decides in favor of artificial insemination. But this decision in a deeply conservative country in which women’s reproductive rights are under constant threat is not one that can be acted upon without great drama. Breasts and Eggs takes as its broader subjects the ongoing repression of women in Japan and the possibility of liberation, poverty, domestic violence, and reproductive ethics. Mixing comedy and realism, it is an epic life-affirming journey about finding inner strength and peace. Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami – eBook Details

Breasts and Eggs: Intense, surprising tale of one woman’s Breasts and Eggs: Intense, surprising tale of one woman’s

You only know what it means to be poor, or have the right to talk about it, if you’ve been there yourself. Maybe you’re poor now. Maybe you were poor in the past. I’m both. I was born poor, and I’m still poor. In 2019 Kawakami published Natsu monogatari (literally “Summer stories” but translated here as Breasts and Eggs). A substantially reworked version—and that is being generous—of her novella now forms the first third of this Breasts and Eggs (“Book 1”). To that is added a significantly longer section (“Book 2”) exploring Natsuko’s relationship to the notion of pregnancy and sperm donation. Book 1 hews fairly closely—although there are obvious sections where Kawakami sought to gild the lily—to the 2008 novella, but those additions do nothing to facilitate the connection to book 2 and, consequently, feel superfluous. This kid was way too skinny. Her dark skin made the patches of psoriasis even harder to overlook. Gray shorts, legs as skinny as the arms poking from her turquoise tank top. Her lips were tight and her shoulders were stiff—she reminded me of myself as a kid. That got me thinking about what it means to be poor.For poor people, window size isn’t even a concept. Nobody has a view. A window is just a blurry pane of glass hidden behind cramped plywood shelves. Who knows if the thing even opens. It’s a greasy rectangle by the broken extractor fan that your family’s never used and never will. Wooooowwwww this book talking about women and also written by women sooo goooodddddd. Im gona give the hints: How old was she, though? Seventy? Older? Wait, hold up. That means she was the same age as Komi. She gasped at her own statement and opened her eyes wide. And she was raped, right? She reminded me of Mum. I couldn’t tell if it was just in the way that daughters start to look like their mothers over time, or if the things that happened to Mum’s body were happening to her now, too. I can’t tell you how many times I almost asked her, Hey, how are you feeling? Are you doing okay? but I always held off, not wanting to make her any more self-conscious. The weird part was, she had a ton of energy. She was used to her dynamic with Midoriko and talked to her like everything was okay, one-sided as it was. She gabbed away, so upbeat that it almost got to me.

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I had no idea why we were running, or where we were heading that time of night. Not even a guess. After a while, I tried to ask her what was going on, without pressing her, but I knew that my father was off-limits. I couldn’t get an answer out of her. It seemed like we were driving through the dark forever, but finally we came to Komi’s house, way on the other side of town, but still less than an hour away by train. Komi was the best. I had no idea why. One day, Makiko said something to her, and she didn’t answer. That was it. At first she thought Midoriko was depressed, but that didn’t seem to be the case. She had a healthy appetite, went to school, and talked like normal with her friends and teachers. Just not with her mum. It didn’t seem like anything else was wrong. She just refused to talk at home. On purpose. Makiko had tried to figure out what was going on, treading carefully, but it was no use. Midoriko wouldn’t give her any hints. I remember telling this to someone once. I can’t remember who it was, but she really went off on me. Come on, though. What if you have one window, but it’s huge, with a garden view or something? You know, like one of those really nice big windows. How could that mean you’re poor? If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know. 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.I still don’t really know why Makiko and her husband separated. I remember having lots of conversations with Makiko about her ex and whether they should get divorced, and I remember it was bad, but now I can’t remember how it happened. Makiko’s ex came from Tokyo, where he grew up. He moved to Osaka for work. They hadn’t been together very long when Makiko got pregnant. One thing I kind of remember is the way he called Makiko baby. Nobody talked like that in Osaka. They only said that in the movies. PDF / EPUB File Name: Breasts_and_Eggs_-_Mieko_Kawakami.pdf, Breasts_and_Eggs_-_Mieko_Kawakami.epub Yeah. Pen and paper. Not talking. I mean, I still talk, but Midoriko writes me her responses. It’s been like that for maybe a month now.