Book Review: Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kamakami

Growing up and having revelations about the world around you is tough, especially as a woman. It is something that I am struggling with righ now, as I have started to realise how painfully fast life moves, with or without you. It is in Mieko Kawakami's book Breasts and Eggs that I have found a sense of confort in the craziness of becoming an adult. This book definitely touched me in a way that I was not expecting. I picked this book randomly off the list of extra readings from my Japanese Lit course, but I am so glad I did. 

Breasts and Eggs follows 30-year-old Natsuko, who currently lives in Tokyo, after growing up in Osaka with her mum and older sister. During the extremes of the Japanese Summer, her older sister comes to visit her, with her teenage daughter in tow. Natsuko's sister is in search of a breast enhancement and Natsuko's niece has recently stopped speaking to her mother. The three girls bond and confront their individual problems over the course of the visit, forming a strong sense of sisterhood between them. Eight years later, we revisit Natsuko, after the success of her first novel. She reconciles with lonliness, uncertainty of having her own children, and the precarious future of her job whilst also reminiscing on her memories of that summer eight years ago. Kawakami tells a heartwarming story of sisterhood and becoming a woman in contemporary times.

Photo of the neighbourhood next
to where Natsuko lives in the book
taken by me!

Kawakami's way of writing is entrancing. She has a beautiful way of drawing you into a scene, and including all the details to make it feel sentimental like a memory. I found the way she described Tokyo so cool; sometimes it would swallow Natsuko and you could feel that sense of being swept away by the city, but Kawakami also described Natsuko's neighbourhood with such extraordinary detail that you could feel the intamacy of the shops she frequented and train stations she visited every day. Her description feel like a person reminiscing on the past, especially in the second book. 

My favourite description in the book was when Natsuko visited the seaside town she lived in for a few years while growing up. Natsuko walks around the neighbourhood, rememebering things from her childhood like where they would eat, the route she took to school and where she used to sit waiting for her mother to come home from the nightshift. The way that Kawakami captured the feeling of going back but not being able to return to the time you were there is haunting. It reminded me so much of how I have felt for the past few years in uni. I can go whereever I want, but I always find myself retracing the steps of my past self, in places I rememeber from my childhood. In the same way as Natsuko, I always hope that I would magically go back in time and see people from my childhood, or see people I used to see around my neighbourhood. Natsuko talks about feeling weird about how it has all changed and how different it is to when she lived there. My partner always tells me that when you leave a place, you will never return to it the way you left it, which I always turn my nose up at. But I think the chapter with Natsuko returning to her town encapsulates this idea in such a bittersweet way, and definitely in a way that had me in teeeeears because of how much it reminded me of myself.

Kawakami also captures such a nuanced perspective on motherhood. I have always been very adamant on never having kids. I always come at it from the angle that I am not cut out to be a mother. But a part of me has always agonised over the way that if I go down this route, I will never be able to know my child. I will never know what they look like, what they like to do, what their favourite colour is, whether they even have a favourite colour (you can definitely tell I'm an over-thinker). I always though that this was a slightly weird way to look at it, until it was the exact same approach as Natsuko. She goes back and forth, regretting a decision she hasn't even made yet, and it reminds me a lot of myself. The characters within the book all offer her a different standpoint and that creates such fascinating points of tension throughout the story. Society is heavily gendered in Japan, and it "goes without question" that women are meant to eventually settle down and have children, but men are expected to continue to work. It is interesting how all of the characters voice their hatred for their husbands and the fathers of their children, and many of the characters are single, including Natsuko. The book delves into sperm donation and its ethics, as Natsuko realises that if she is going to have a child, she wants to do it all by herself. It is such a unique approach to the struggle of deciding to have children, I have never really seen it discussed anywhere else like this, but so much of it resonated with me and my feelings around it. I was utterly taken with the way that Kawakami was able to capture the worries of growing up as a woman, and how having children often defines you as a women, as well as the struggle around trying to figure out what is truly best for you under the pressure of time. 

On a technical level, I think the book was amazing too. It was a bit slow in parts, but it is definitely a slice-of-life, reminicing kind of book. The plot meanders at points, but it portrays emotion in a way I have never seen before. I constantly felt like I was there, which made the story resonate in such a special way. This will definitely be a book that I reread, even though I don't think that there is anything new to capture, it was so special that I couldn't possibly just read it once. 

This is my first ever book review (that wasn't for school lol) so it's a bit personal and I can't imagine it is very convincing. But if you do have the time, this story is so unique and special, I think that everyone should give it a try.

Love,

Nini

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