"Breasts and Eggs" by Mieko Kawakami: A Novel - First Printing

Elkins: Baught it as a gift, looks really good and the person was happy about it

Germany on Dec 05, 2023

Ali: Mieko is one of my favourite writers

United Kingdom on Nov 25, 2023

Jill: Breasts and Eggs is about all women, struggling with body image, sexuality, bodily integrity, marriage and parenthood. The narrator is Natsuko, an asexual writer based in Tokyo who feels the need to have a child on her own, after she spent a summer with her older sister Makiko obsessed with youth and plastic surgery, and who works as a club hostess, and her teenage daughter Midoriko who grew up without a father figure and refuses to speak to her mother and become a woman too soon. Natsuko and Makiko grow up in Osaka, and their life has never been easy but their strength rest on two important female figure, their mother and grandmother, both of whom passed away when they were too young, collecting memories of a past of grief and lack of economic resources that forced them both to work hard to empower themselves.

The women in this novel are all in their 30s so I could relate on several topics the author addresses in this feminist novel. I actually enjoyed this translation by Sam Bett and David Boyd, two men, and they did an excellent job in my opinion. Meiko Kawakami rambles a lot tough, it seems like I was reading Donna Tartt's novel, too much details and internal monologue...

Italy on Mar 22, 2023

Brian: my daughter love reading the book over and over again

Canada on Mar 01, 2023

Ana lorena ruiz gonzález: I really loved this book. It is compelling, different, interesting, and beautiful.
I found it gave a unique perspective on womanhood, motherhood and just the female experience.
Highly recommend it.

Mexico on Nov 04, 2022

Phred: Before reviewing Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs directly I am granting myself a little time for side comments. Many of the reviews speak more to the new found fastidiousness American reviewers have over breasts than to any meaningful analysis of this book. After so much nonsense criticism of Murakami and his alleged “breast issues” Kawakami makes it clear that actual women can and do obsess over thierown. One may have a fantasy of one day being able to afford breast augmentation, a pre-pubescent may worry about when and how big hers will be and another being sexless will still note that hers are nearly not there. Given this version of the title of the book, breasts loom large in Kawakami’s imagined world. Elevating this thought, the author, speaks true to power, about the fact rightly or wrongly these secondary sexual markers are important to women.

The history of the publication of Breasts and Eggs is that they are two nearly separate novellas about the same central character at two points in her adult life. Thirty-year-old Natsu is barely surviving as a writer. She lives in near poverty, as she has since childhood. Her childhood was spent mostly working the...

United States on Sep 19, 2021

Wally Wood: Meiko Kawakami's novel, Breasts and Eggs, is her first to be published in English. The publisher, Europa Editions, says that it will be publishing two more, Heaven and The Night Belongs to Lovers.

Let's start with the book's title. The original title is Natsumonogatari, which could be translated as A Summer Story. Because the character telling her story is named Natsuko, a pun is buried in the title, which similar to the Genji Monogatari might also be read as The Tale of Natsu[ko].

Be that as it may, Breasts and Eggs is both appropriate more tempting title than A Summer Story. In Book One, Natsuko's older sister Makiko comes up to Tokyo from Osaka in the summer with her daughter Midoriko intent on obtaining breast enlargement surgery, staying with Natsuko.

In Book Two, ten years later, Natsuko—single, childless, now economically secure, and pushing forty—begins to consider having a child. There are two problems with this impulse: Natsuko finds sexual intercourse worse than distasteful. She tried it in her late teens, early twenties with a boyfriend, so coitus is out. Also Japanese society discourages single women from having artificial insemination. It...

United States on Jun 12, 2020