Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

A BEST BOOK OF 2020
TIME Magazine・The Atlantic・Book Riot・Electric Literature・The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year)

The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki Murakami as Japan's most important contemporary novelist, WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE.

On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. The story of these three women reunited in a working-class neighborhood of Tokyo is told through the gaze of Natsu--thirty years old, an aspiring writer, haunted by hardships endured in her youth. Over the course of their few days together in the capital, Midoriko's silence will prove a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and family secrets.

On yet another blistering summer's day eight years later, Natsu, during a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless. 

One of Japan's most important and best-selling writers, Mieko Kawakami mixes stylistic inventiveness, wry humor, and riveting emotional depth to tell a story of contemporary womanhood in Japan. Breasts and Eggs recounts the intimate journeys of three women on the path to finding peace and futures they can call their own.

"Original and deeply moving...This book is a gift."--Laura van den Berg

Mieko Kawakami, who was born in the prefecture of Osaka, began her career as a singer and songwriter before turning to writing in 2006. Her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, was nominated for the Akutagawa Award and won the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers when it was published in 2007. Breasts and Eggs, a short novella, was released the next year. It was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary distinction, and praised by noted author Yoko Ogawa. Paradise, The Night Belongs to Lovers, and the substantially extended Breasts and Eggs, Kawakami's first novel published in English, are among her works.