Author: Meiko Kawakami

Publisher: Europa Editions

ISBN: 978-1-60945-587-3


Meiko Kawakami's novel, Breasts and Eggs, is her first to be published in English. The publisher, Europa Editions, says that it will be publishing two more, Heaven and The Night Belongs to Lovers

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Let's start with the book's title. The original title is Natsumonogatari, which could be translated as A Summer Story. Because the character telling her story is named Natsuko, a pun is buried in the title, which similar to the Genji Monogatari might also be read as The Tale of Natsu[ko].

Be that as it may, Breasts and Eggs is both appropriate more tempting title than A Summer Story. In Book One, Natsuko's older sister Makiko comes up to Tokyo from Osaka in the summer with her daughter Midoriko intent on obtaining breast enlargement surgery, staying with Natsuko. 

In Book Two, ten years later, Natsuko—single, childless, now economically secure, and pushing forty—begins to consider having a child. There are two problems with this impulse: Natsuko finds sexual intercourse worse than distasteful. She tried it in her late teens, early twenties with a boyfriend, so coitus is out. Also Japanese society discourages single women from having artificial insemination. It exists, but it's for married couples who cannot have a child.

Natsuko is 29 in Book One; Makiko is 39; and Midoriko is 12 (and communicates with her mother and aunt only in writing; she'll talk to her friends but not to her mother). The girls grew up in Osaka in a cramped and gloomy apartment over an izakaya. One day when Natsuko came home from elementary school, her layabout father was gone and they never saw him again. They moved in with grandmother and mother worked a couple jobs and in a bar. Mom died when Natsuko, was 13 and two years later grandmother died. At the beginning of Breasts and Eggs Natsuko has been living in Tokyo, working in a bookstore to support herself with ambitions of being a writer. Makiko is a single mother working as a bar hostess having made an unfortunate and short-lived marriage.

The novel is worth reading for several reasons. Kawakami is able to covey Natsuko's daily life, family history and relationships, her friendships, and the—I guess—texture of her lived experience. We know who she is, what she wants, why she wants it. And we can understand why her sister could want improved breasts. The book also conveys a sharp picture of a contemporary Japanese life. This is what it is like to live as this aspiring woman in Japan today. Is Natsuko typical? Probably not. Is she representative? Probably not. Is she Japanese? Absolutely.

In Book One Kawakami does allow the reader access to information Natsuko doesn't have. These are the entries from her 12-year-old niece's journal, thoughts like: "It feels like I'm trapped inside my body. It decides when I get hungry, and when I'll get my period. From birth to death, you have to keep eating and making money just to stay alive. I see what working every night does to my mom. It takes it out of her. But what's it all for. Life is hard enough with just one body. Why would anyone want to make another one?  . . ."

The book is more than the sisters' dilemmas about their breasts and eggs. At one point, Natsuko and a writer friend talk about dialect in fiction. The friend says that in Osaka she heard "these three women just talking, a million miles an hour, getting everything in there. There was so much going on. Multiple perspectives, mixed tenses, the whole shebang. They were cracking up, but they were having a real conversation. Nothing like on TV. Everything on TV is tailored for TV . . . What gets me is how writing always fails to capture it. Like, the way those three women were talking. I mean, you couldn't reproduce that performance on the page and get the same dynamic . . ."

Sam Bett, a prize-winning translator, and David Boyd, an assistant professor Japanese at the University of North Carolina, translated Breasts and Eggs. The translation is, as I hope my two short quotes indicate, smooth and resourceful ("shebang"!). They did not translate every Japanese term—izakaya, mugicha, okonomiyaki, tanto—which means they did not have to slow a sentence down by explaining, and the context provides the approximate meaning for readers who have no Japanese at all.

The jacket flap copy says "Kawakami, who exploded onto the cultural scene first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, is now one of Japan's most important and best-selling writers." Based on Breasts and Eggs, she should be