Breasts and Eggs

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In a fever, Natsuko is haunted by Yuriko’s vision, and within this hallucinatory moment, she accepts the validity of the question. It’s an insightful angle, although as she also observes, we all form our own personal relationships with these authors and their characters, and some experience Murakami with a sense of discomfort. In 2019 Kawakami published Natsu monogatari (literally “Summer stories” but translated here as Breasts and Eggs). It’s 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.

Breasts and Eggs Quotes by Mieko Kawakami - Goodreads Breasts and Eggs Quotes by Mieko Kawakami - Goodreads

Breasts and Eggs tackles the way she justifies this desire to herself, made near-impossible by the strictures of contemporary Japanese patriarchal society.

She has no real doubt that she wants a child, despite being asexual and single, and facing pressure to follow up on her successful first novel. Mieko Kawakami‘s Breasts and Eggs is one of the most remarkable feminist novels to appear in the English language (even if it was originally published in Japanese).

Breasts and Eggs - Wikipedia

I couldn't move; in fact, I was being pulled away, slipping further every second from the blinding light of that reality. Natsuko’s unswerving desire to be pregnant, despite renouncing this heterosexual dynamic, asks questions of the terms on which we structure ideas around gender, sexuality and parenthood.She was used to her dynamic with Midoriko and talked to her like everything was okay, one-sided as it was. Wiping the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand, I turned on the AC and brought it down to 72 degrees.

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami review - The Guardian

He clutched a badly beaten clear umbrella in one hand and reached up for a strap with the other but stumbled when he missed. For a few years after I turned eighteen, I lived with them in an apartment back in Osaka, when Midoriko was just a baby. Like, maybe the real me would be waking up soon, and would walk to school, and have another normal day. Mixing comedy and realism, it is an epic life-affirming journey about finding inner strength and peace.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. Evoking these arguments, Yuriko presents Natsuko with a dilemma that is reminiscent of the one in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, in which the happiness of a utopian town depends on the unhappiness of a single child. Lately, when other girls go to the bathroom, the ones who have had their period cling together and talk about things only they understand. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Stopping along the way for a 210-yen bowl of noodles, we braved the heat and walked the ten minutes home, while the cries of cicadas smeared the atmosphere.