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

I read mostly for entertainment. 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 (*medicine) should “cure sometimes, relieve often” and entertain (*comfort) always. There are many ways to read just as there are to live and, for me anyway, by the time I’ve figured out what to live for, half of life has almost cruised by. So why not read just for fun.

It is difficult to sustain this “fun”. Some books make a great impression, then falter after twenty pages. Is it a sprint or a marathon? Different muscles are used, I’m pretty sure. 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, I would buy whatever the authors have written and will write, the bad, the ugly, and the good.

Breasts and Eggs is one of those books that sustain, abate the opening vignette gives off 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 I (main character, middle age, female writer) had made her resolutions. Most fiction loses steam toward the end – a theory explained by Thomas C Foster – but Breasts and Eggs is not one of them. The wow factor of this book appeared at the end. Imagine spending half an hour in line at a theme park’s attraction, killing time by casually 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, especially the little bit of romance in it, 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 – systematic misogyny, childhood trauma, etc. In short, if you have always wanted one thing for a long, long time but, under the life’s current, get pushed away from that dream/subject/person/place, the story encourages you to pivot. 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 – the scenes bristle from the pages. A few: 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, her body shattered by pain and terror. The dialogues are rich, but I think I have stayed mainly for these visions. 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]

In sum, a beautifully crafted, heart-warming and inspirational book about womanhood, with women supporting each other and a man who loves generously. Max entertaining and will definitely reread.

*There’s also 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.