Sam Bett (Translator), David Boyd (Translator), 2021

To misquote Edward Livingston Trudeau – the founder of an American tuberculosis sanitarium in the Magic Mountain‘s style, who also reiterated the idea from Hippocrates, literature should “cure sometimes, relieve often and entertain always”.

Some books make a great impression, then falter after twenty pages. Is it a sprint or a marathon? Different muscles are used. But when that spark – the joy, the sting, craving or soothing, whatever it is that entraps you in the first paragraph – dies, there is no resuscitation. Books that sustain ’til page 300^th and beyond, they’re golden.

Breasts and Eggs is one of those books that sustain, abate the opening vignette gives an ordinary vibe that doesn’t scream “buy me”. It starts out slow and accelerates two-third of the way, passed the mid-point, well after the narrator had made the critical decision. The wow factor of this book was at the end. Imagine spending half an hour in line at a theme park’s attraction, killing time by observing the mini-dramas of families ahead of you, then, alas, being thrown out of that mundane, slow-motion, and gravity-abide world in two minutes, being churned upside-sown, satisfyingly, on the roller coaster you’ve been waiting for. That’s how this novel works.

The main theme – the most important, I think – is about women trying to figure out what they want, what they really want, and jump hurdles to get it. Subjectively, the breasts and the baby in the novel are metaphors for *that one thing. A similar metaphorical approach in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, the minimum wage gig that means nothing to anyone but everything to her. How this generation of female Japanese authors are so superb at creating such proxies, I don’t know, but this trend is for another post.

Mieko Kawakami’s craft is instantly recognizable because of her dialogues and striking visualization. What women see in each other when they stand naked in the bathhouse; where unborn children sleep, before the eggs are fertilized; the sky, as seen by a young girl from the car window, her back to the seat. Wiki has it that the original novella Breasts and Eggs (2008, 乳と卵) plays a heavier hand on the Kansai dialogue than this 400-page novel, which came out in Japan as Summer Stories (2019, 夏物語). *The English translation must have figured breasts sell best, so out with summer.

A heart-warming book that is also max entertaining.

*There’s an interesting Q&A with Sam Bett and David Boyd – the translator duo for all of Mieko Kawakami’s works, e.g. Q = does the translator’s gender matter for books about women’s lives?

*Trigger warning: child abuse, sexual assault.