Breasts and Eggs
Ratings54
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings54
Average rating3.9
A novel that “considers the agency . . . women exert over their bodies and charts the emotional underpinnings of physical changes . . . with humor and empathy” (The New Yorker). On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. Over the course of their few days together in the capital, Midoriko’s silence will prove a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and family secrets. On yet another summer’s day eight years later, Natsu, during a journey back to her native city, confronts her anxieties about growing old alone and childless. Bestselling author Mieko Kawakami mixes stylistic inventiveness and riveting emotional depth to tell a story of contemporary womanhood in Japan. “Took my breath away.” —Haruki Murakami, #1 New York Times–bestselling author The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle “Kawakami lobbed a literary grenade into the fusty, male-dominated world of Japanese fiction with Breast and Eggs.” —The Economist “A sharply observed and heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a woman.” —TIME “Raw, funny, mundane, heartbreaking.” —The Atlantic “A bracing, feminist exploration of daily life in Japan.” —Entertainment Weekly “Timely feminist themes; strange, surreal prose; and wonderful characters will transcend cultural barriers and enchant readers.” —The New York Observer “Bracing and evocative, tender yet unflinching.” —Publishers Weekly “Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body—its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions. And she is especially good at capturing its longings.” —The New York Times Book Review
Reviews with the most likes.
I have complicated feelings about this book. It occasionally dips into brilliance before grinding to a brutal halt again. The first half was genuinely engaging, and then you randomly crash into the most wildly transphobic scene in probably any recent novel not written by J.K. Rowling, and then the narrative moves on like it never happened.
I loved this book's analysis and description of how being a middle age working class woman experience is like.
The descriptions were nice and soothing at first but sincerely, they became repetitive eventually.
Apart from that, I loved it. I think that It makes sense stylistically that Natsuko as a writer, is very detailed with her thoughts and Dead Eye is more simplistic.
I think it’s important for people to read books that are explicitly about experiences that they can not and will not have in their lives. It’s a great way to expand one’s horizons and I find that the process makes people more enlightened. This idea is what drew me to Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. The vast majority of Japanese books that I’ve read have been written by men and for men, with the women in these books either being nonexistent or totally unrealistic. Breasts and Eggs is the opposite of that. It is written by a woman for women with the majority of the characters being women and the entire focus of the book being on womens’ issues. That makes it a book that is very important for me as a man to read but one that I am unsure of how to review. Because I question what right I have to critique it. What I will do is lay out the facts of how I feel about this book in as matter-of-fact a way as I can possibly get.
I love it. I love pretty much everything about it. I love how it’s structured. I love how it’s narrated. I love the nuances of the characters. I love the questions it brings up. I love how some of those questions aren’t totally answered. I love the big emotional scenes. I love the more subtle parts. It’s a book that I feel is totally successful in what it is trying to do, which is about the highest praise I can give any novel. And those are the facts.
