Breasts and Eggs

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Breasts and Eggs is populated by women who are post-desire in many different ways: they do not yearn for passionate fulfillment, and are largely unconcerned with desirability, romance, or sexual pleasure.

This sense of self-understanding, and whatever personal growth it entails, is the goal consistently sought in these stories; its achievement the denouement and reward for both reader and protagonist alike. She actually resented me for making the suggestion, and we wound up saying some pretty mean things to each other.

Breasts and Eggs, arguably, is a novel imbued with ‘heterofatalism’, to use Sophie Lewis’s reformulation of Indiana Seresin’s concept ‘heteropessimism’, in which ‘performative disaffiliations’ with heterosexuality are ‘rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality’. At first I thought Natsuko’s way of dealing with the dilemma was a hasty wrap-up to conclude the story, but now I’m not so sure. Sperm, eggs, sex, procreation, all of these things trigger in her a reaction of disgust and hate, and this hate has spilled out, leaving her literally speechless in the face of her mother’s obsession with breast enhancement. One fascinating element of Kawakami’s work, for which she has been celebrated in Japan, is her use of Osaka dialect. Yuriko’s words reverberate throughout Breasts and Eggs as Kawakami places birth itself under scrutiny.

I must have been staring, because Makiko said, “Forget that, look at this,” and passed me the brochure for the clinic she had chosen. Artificial insemination is forbidden to single Japanese women: she must either go to a sperm bank outside the country or make illegal arrangements with a donor. The first and the second parts do have a slightly different feel -- the first a sort of separate whole, which isn't fully tied together with the second (those eight years are a hell of a leap, all of a sudden) -- but the differences aren't too jarring. Kawakami is clearly far more interested in how relationships between women play out in patriarchal capitalist society than she is in exploring the structure of that patriarchy, even as the women she depicts share experiences of unhappy marriages, divorce and flight from men. It won the 138th Akutagawa Prize for the second half of 2007, which was announced on 16 January 2008.

In contrast to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy or Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Kawakami is largely uninterested in exploring conflicts between the processes of art and mothering. Kawakami leaves the door open to the possibility of the virtuous man: there are at least two characters in the novel that might fit this bill. In terms of rhythm and raunchiness, I’m not sure – when comparing the two strikingly different translations at length – which part is Kawakami, which the rehousing and reimagining that is translation. Poverty, menstruation and childbearing are depicted as entrapping cycles, reinforced by Natsuko’s painful memories of her and her sister’s childhood; Makiko’s stories about work draw a vivid picture of male privilege and the costs and demands of low-paid, physical labour on the body. She cried and said she’d never asked for handouts, just worked as hard as she could, morning, noon and night.