Over a sweltering summer in Tokyo, Natsuko Natsume, a struggling writer from a poor Osaka background, hosts her older sister Makiko and Makiko's twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko. Makiko has become fixated on getting breast enhancement surgery, chasing a sense of control over a body worn down by work and age, while Midoriko, on the cusp of puberty and furious at the changes coming for her own body, has stopped speaking to her mother entirely and communicates only through a notebook.
The novel's second half leaps forward several years to follow Natsuko alone as she wrestles with a very different question: whether to have a child on her own, outside marriage and conventional expectation, by seeking a sperm donor. Around her, a chorus of women voice their own experiences of motherhood, donor conception, and the female body.
Mieko Kawakami's breakthrough novel, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is a frank, expansive work about class, womanhood, and bodily autonomy in contemporary Japan. Earthy and philosophical by turns, Breasts and Eggs established Kawakami as one of the most important voices in Japanese literature.
