Like a lot of novels I started reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs not knowing much about it but hoping it would be a good ‘un. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually really good - up to a point. That point would be after the episode where the main character’s older sister and her daughter come to visit. All that stuff after - about the main character Natsu trying to get pregnant artificially - was ass!
The novel felt so much like two different stories stuck together that I looked into the background a little more and found out that, yup, the first story - let’s call it Breasts, because it’s about Natsu’s older sister wanting to get a boob job - was originally a standalone novella, and the second part - let’s call it Eggs because it’s about Natsu trying to get pregnant artificially - was written later. They’re combined here as Breasts and Eggs.
If this book was just Breasts I would giving it four out of five stars. It’s a really interesting portrait of a 30 year-old single woman working dead-end jobs and trying to be a writer while her equally impoverished older sister struggles to make a living as an aging hostess and maintaining a difficult relationship with her teenage daughter.
Both sisters have been poor their whole lives and still can’t make any decent money. It’s a fascinating portrait of the underside of Japanese society that you rarely see and reminds me of the superb 2018 Japanese movie Shoplifters. Natsu, Makiko and Midoriko are fully-realised, believable and sympathetic characters whose ability to keep going despite seemingly never-ending hardship was inspiring. I was fully onboard and couldn’t wait to see where this novel was going.
And then there’s the time jump, both in the novel and in real life, because Kawakami wrote Eggs after Breasts and also set it ten years later. Natsu’s a successful novelist now and feels the desire to become a mother - except she hates sex and can’t have a relationship with a man.
This went on and on and on for two-thirds of the book - Eggs is twice as long as Breasts and isn’t even half as interesting; this section is what really drags down the rating to two stars. Natsu looks into her options for artificial insemination, gets involved with a strange support network of people who were born artificially, and things happen for no real reason to no effect (characters dying, relationships ending and starting) before closing on a trite, feel-good ending.
Makiko and Midoriko appear briefly in Eggs but they didn’t seem like the same characters as before and it felt like their inclusion was an attempt to connect the two disparate pieces into fooling the reader that they were reading a complete novel. Even Natsu doesn’t seem like the same person she was in Eggs. I mean, sure, people change over time, but it just felt arbitrary that she would suddenly want to become a mother. Especially since a large part of Breasts was about how bad her and Makiko’s childhood was and how providing for kids had killed their single mother at an early age.
I suppose the novel is vaguely about being a woman, or something, but I didn’t think Kawakami had anything substantial to say about that, if it was. The first section alone would’ve been a great standalone piece about the struggles and relationships of working-class women in modern-day Japan but paired with the meandering, dull, utterly boring second and final piece about getting pregnant without having sex, that unfortunately makes up the bulk of this book, the novel turns into a slow and tedious slog to the final page.
I doubt anyone would stop reading after the first section, which is the only part of the book I’d say is worth reading, but, for anyone struggling beyond that point, I’d say to give up as it doesn’t get any better after it.
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