I love Mieko Kawakami.
And I love her even more because the governor of Japan does not:
Shintaro Ishihara, then Tokyo’s governor and himself a former novelist, called [Kawakami’s novel] “unpleasant and intolerable.” [The Guardian]
Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs should not be unpleasant or intolerable to anyone, but it’s deeply telling if it is. I read this at the Central Park tennis club and it quickly scared away both men who came up to ask me what I was reading.
For those who don’t know, Breasts and Eggs is a novel from 2019 that has been incredibly influential to Japan’s feminist movement. It’s split up into two books; the first book is about breasts and the second book is about eggs. In the first book, Natsuko’s [the narrator’s] sister Makiko wants to get a boob job. She’s a hostess and a single mother in her 40s who is deeply insecure about her breasts after breastfeeding her child. Younger women begin to displace Makiko in the bar she works at and she is compelled to appease the male gaze for the sake of her income. The second book takes place eight years later and follows Natsuko’s journey with becoming an intentionally single mother through sperm donation.
This book is such a gem. The first half in particular is just perfect. It discusses every facet of womanhood in Japan, but is deeply relevant to any woman in the world.
“‘No man will ever understand the things that really matter to a woman. If you think about it, it’s just obvious.’
‘But what do you mean, ‘what matters to a woman?’’
‘I mean the pain,’ said Rika. ‘How much it hurts to be a woman…’” (314)
One of my favorite things Kawakami has done is when she ruthlessly interviewed Haruki Murakami. They were (and still are) on good terms, Kawakami has cited him as a literary inspiration, and he blurbed her book: “I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs.” Yet she didn’t let any of this or his immense reputation hold her back from asking tough (and well-deserved!!) questions.
She respectfully, but firmly, probed the sexism that she saw lurking within Murakami’s fiction. “I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function,” she said, lamenting the frequency that his women are “sacrificed” for the sake of the male leads.
Murakami seemed a little taken aback by this charge, replying: “I’m not interested in individualistic characters. And that applies to men and women both.”
Sure, Haruki. Keep in mind this man also said:
“I may have the ability to discern a sort of insanity within women. Why? I don’t know. Aside from that, women serve as mediums (shamans) in my stories. They guide us to dreamlike things, or to the other world. Perhaps this corresponds to something within my own psyche.”
Reading that quote always makes me laugh. This is from an interview where he discussed Sputnik Sweetheart that has unfortunately been deleted from his official website (I found it when I was working on this research paper about Murakami’s ephemeral romances). Even if he’s annoying Murakami comes off better when he isn’t trying to defend his work to feminists. Needless to say, Kawakami said in a later interview:
“I believed it was absolutely my job to ask about it,” she said.
One of my favorite themes in Breasts and Eggs was the discussion of motherhood. Two women represented the extremes of being pro-procreation and anti-procreation (described in excellent prose):
“…until she had a kid of her own, she didn’t know the first thing about love. Like half the world had just been out of reach” (322).
…Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that’s what you want for yourself, and that doesn’t make any sense” (349).
Kawakami actually discusses the second perspective further in an interview with The Guardian, despite being a mother herself:
“There’s beauty and violence to making another human being,” she says. “You’re creating a life but you know it ends in death.” She ponders this more as she watches her son grow up. “When I see him in his sleep and think of his future, if he gets sick and has to go through pain, I realise that I’m the person who actually began his life. I started this – it was solely done through my desire” [The Guardian].
Natsuko, the narrator, receives conflicting opinions about becoming a single mother by choice. Many women in the novel affirm her decision, while many others are horrified by the idea of not only a single mother but a single mother by sperm donation. The majority of the book is dialogue, so having characters that represent a range of opinions was very helpful and interesting.
But not only is she incredibly smart and influential, Kawakami is an excellent, excellent writer. I read Heaven a couple weeks ago, which is another novel by her that follows two young children in Japan who face brutal bullying in middle school. It blew me away in how it was gorgeous and deeply atmospheric, on a greater level than Breasts and Eggs.
But here are a couple of passages from Breasts and Eggs I found particularly gorgeous:
“In December, I began to wear a coat over my sweater when I went outside. The bark had almost turned black on the gingko trees planted at even intervals on the sidewalk, and the wind was getting chillier by the day. It was hotpot weather, and the supermarkets displayed the soup stock an the ponzu just inside the door…” (215).
“By then my eyes had totally adjusted to the darkness. The plywood shelves, Midoriko’s t-shirts hanging up to dry, the bookcase. All different shades of blue” (413).
She has said in interviews that breaking away from the traditional style of Japanese literature is very important for her. Her bold novels have certainly accomplished this goal while still being incredibly Japanese.
Her other job, she says, is to help dispatch the orientalist cliches that have riddled fiction about Japan for decades. Murakami excepted, the published canon – she cites Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata as examples – is full of stock imagery of “geisha and Mt Fuji” [The Guardian].
While her writing is not quite aligned with Japanese canon, she is showing parts of Japan that have been completely overlooked by literary voices for hundreds of years: Japanese girlhood, hostesses in the hostess bars, motherhood.
Additionally, I believe Breasts and Eggs is written in Osaka dialect, which gets lost in the translation. I really wish I knew Japanese because this appears to be an important part of Natsuko’s character and her feeling like an outsider.
It appears that much of Natsuko’s character is based off of Kawakami’s life experience, which is rather incredible.
“Kawakami grew up poor in Osaka. She had what she describes as a “difficult” relationship with her largely absent father. At 14, she began working in a factory to support her family, making heaters and electric fans. “But I was always quite a philosophical child, asking odd questions and in a hurry to grow up.” Later, like Makiko, she worked as a hostess, a temporary route for some working-class girls out of poverty and dead-end jobs. It was a far cry from the lives of her contemporaries, many graduates from Japan’s top universities” [The Guardian].
Considering her childhood, Kawakami’s path to becoming an author is miraculous and truly a gift to all of us. I love Mieko Kawakami and her writing so incredibly much, and it is inspiring to see the ripples she has had across Japan and across the world.
“Women are no longer content to shut up,” she says, citing recent protests over workplace rules forcing Japanese women to wear high heels, and banning glasses because it gave customers a “cold impression”. “Young women in their 20s are much freer than we were to speak up,” she says, though she also laments that there’s a long way to go yet. “I notice that women in their 40s with a certain status, like me, don’t get attacked but women in their 20s do. The lesson is that men won’t give up their privileges easily. They’re brainwashed: be strong, don’t cry. But everyone gets old and understands what it is to be weak. We’re at the point where all that old stuff must be questioned.” [The Guardian]✪
stop. i love breast and eggs so much.