Breasts and Eggs

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Braden, Allison (1 April 2020). "Translation as an Exercise in Letting Go: An Interview with Sam Bett and David Boyd on Translating Mieko Kawakami". Asymptote Journal . Retrieved 22 October 2020. Translation as an Exercise in Letting Go - An Interview with Sam Bett and David Boyd on Translating Mieko Kawakami From Makiko, who is struggling to make ends meet but is determined to go through with breast augmentation surgery, to Natsuko, who has climbed the social ladder and “wants to meet her future child”, to Yuriko, who has concluded that bringing a baby into the world is the worst thing an individual can do, Kawakami introduces a wide variety of characters and positions. It then becomes impossible for the reader not to dwell on how an individual’s positionality with respect to class, gender, race and sexuality shapes their experiences. An added twist to the story is that Midoriko has stopped talking to her mother, for over half a year already.

Mieko Kawakami. “ Acts of Recognition: On the Women Characters of Haruki Murakami”. Literary Hub. 03 October 2019. What renders this work magnificent is its detailed attention to the inner voice, a focus Kawakami shares with other well-known contemporary writers from Japan. A host of bestselling authors — Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami, Kazuki Kaneshiro, Yu Miri, Sayaka Murata, Hiromi Kawakami, and others, all of whom have work translated into English — have grappled in different and rewarding ways with this perspective. While Murakami’s work probes more fantastical terrain, it often takes as its point of departure the banality of the everyday, elevating protagonists’ experience of the everyday into otherworldly fantasias.

The Sociological Review

An added delight is Kawakami’s gentle exposé of the literary life. Anyone who has struggled as a writer themselves can’t help but both laugh and nod at Natsuko’s efforts to dodge editors, stay awake at book readings and launches, and balance the need to earn money with the desire to produce meaningful work. She portrays with bold honesty the misogyny of the field as well. But she finds positive meaning in other women writers and editors. Female friendships form an important theme in the book, as does the fundamental challenge of creating and maintaining friendships in our alienated, digital age. Natsuko is grounded, though quietly sorrowful in her own way. She is a window into this world for us, but by no means a blank slate. People are willing to accept the pain and suffering of others, limitless amounts of it, as long as it helps them to keep on believing in whatever it is that they want to believe. Love, meaning, doesn’t matter.”

Book Two’s pace and progress is less deliberate and more ponderous, with Natsuko making little progress with her writing, and very slow progress in her search for her child. 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.

Light spilled off every surface. The light of day. I meditated on this phrase and stared into the radiance.” You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

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.Several people assume the catchy if unlikely 'Natsuko Natsume' is the pen name she adopted, but, as she assures them, it really is her name.) Kawakami writes with a remarkable frankness grounded in bodily experience and emotional honesty. Women’s bodies and experiences are centred in the narrative; she writes of menstruation, ovulation, pregnancy with a candor that renders them a natural part of the story. Nothing is forced or didactic; nor is anything whitewashed. A recurrent theme in Book One is Natsuko’s sister Makiko’s desire for breast implants, and the arguments and dilemmas this produces. The journal entries written by Natsuko’s niece, Midoriko, in Book One chronicle a teenager’s efforts to grapple with her changing body and the misogyny she encounters in school and life. In Book One, we see the world through the eyes of Natsuko, a thirty-year-old woman living alone in a Tokyo apartment and working tirelessly in her spare time to become an author. Initially, she asked me what I thought and actually listened to what I said, but things changed as the calls became more frequent, up to three nights a week, and always at one in the morning, after Makiko got home from work. It became increasingly clear that she wasn’t looking for my opinion Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police Breasts and Eggs, which caused a small sensation upon its publication in the UK and US last year, was a fierce yet thoughtful tale of working-class womanhood