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REVIEW OF BREASTS AND EGGS (2020) BY MIEKO KAWAKAMI, TRANSLATED BY SAM BETT AND DAVID BOYD


    Every time I finish a book, I sit with it. I like to stare blankly into space and let the book make its way into my pores. Then I call someone and tell them all about it. It's this way that my opinions begin to take shape. The next thing I do is read other's reviews. It seems like I and everyone else who read this book was originally transfixed by not only
    1. The cover, which is beautiful. 

    but also

    2. The blurb by Haruki Murakami, who was the author who reignited my love of reading when I got into college, and who is still one of my favorite authors to this day. 
Unfortunately, while I'd gladly hang the cover of this book on a wall in my house as decoration, Breasts and Eggs did not take my breath away. At least not all of it. It's gonna be 3 hearts from me, bud.
    
    Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs began as a short story which now makes up the first half of the book. The second half is a continuation. Each addresses two sisters, older and younger, and are problem driven narratives. The first half (the original story) is about a writer named Natsu and her sister Makiko. Makiko is obsessed with getting breast implants and travels to see Natsu in Tokyo with the objective of visiting a plastic surgeon. Traveling with her is her daughter, Midoriko, who refuses to speak to either her mother or her aunt, instead writing her desires and responses in a small journal. 
    
    The second half of Breasts and Eggs takes place a few years later, Midoriko is in college and Natsu is resting upon the laurels of her first novel which was a major success. Despite this, she is unhappy. Natsu doesn't have or want a partner. Natsu is adverse to having sex. Her only desire though, is to have a child. She becomes desperately obsessed with having a child, spending hours upon hours researching artificial insemination. She reads about the children of sperm donors who do not know who their parents are, and asks intense questions of each. She is locked in an internal debate. She receives vitriol from most of her friends for desiring to find a donor and have a baby on her own. 
    
    It's not easy to find a donor in Japan as a single woman, or at least it wasn't when this book was written. In fact, it's taboo. This is addressed over and over and over in Breasts and Eggs. Natsu destroys entire relationships due to her wishes. She puts herself in dangerous situations. She isolates. However, she makes a few new allies too in very unlikely places. This should have made for an intriguing problem and an addictive plot. My only issue is, this book goes on too long.


    Kawakami could have, in my opinion, cut about 30 pages of longing for children out and I would have enjoyed this much more. She lost me after a while, and I found myself becoming disconnected from the central plot of the story. Not even her stark and elegant prose could reel me back in until the last twenty pages or so. That being said there was a lot I enjoyed about this book. I liked that Kawakami's  book is not only a biting feminist critique but also that she draws various paralelles throughout the story. Natsu's sister is a single mother, Natsu's mother was also a single mother. Natsu cannot write another novel because she is transfixed by the idea of having a child, of producing something that is both her and not her. Throughout the book, you will find ideas that repeat like this, and I felt parts of the narrative were cyclical. Though perhaps, they were a little too cyclical for me.

RATING: 💛💛💛💔💔

LINKS: 

A-LIKES: 
"First Love/Late Spring" by Mitski, from the album Bury Me at Makeout Creek
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
The Fifth Child by Doris Lesing 





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