BREASTS AND EGGS: Reclaiming our bodies and ourselves

Season 2, Episode 2 Transcript

(Note: Due to mic issues, choppy sections were excised from the audio recording but have been restored in this transcript.)

V: Happy Wednesday! I’m Vina Orden, here with Tamara Crawford. And this is The Lift Up Podcast — inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. In this Episode 2 of Season 2, we’re discussing the book Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami.

Breasts and Eggs, published in Japanese in 2008 as Chichi to Ran, was originally a short novel awarded the 138th Akutagawa Prize. In 2019, Kawakami published the novel Natsu monogatari, a longer rewritten version of Chichi to Ran. This version, translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd and published in 2020 under the original Breast and Eggs title, is the edition we read for the podcast.

So, let’s get right to it …

V: Hey, Tamara! It’s so hard to believe that another month and two snowstorms have gone by since we last spoke … Although I’m grateful that spring seems to be in the air here in New York. I actually took my big puffer jacket to the cleaners, hoping that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy … So, how have you been?

T: Hey, Vina! So good to be on with you today discussing Breasts and Eggs. I mean, talking about the snow, we had here in the UK a really weird, unprecedented — at least since I’ve been here, I should say — snow storm for three days in London! Usually you get that kind of snow in the North … It was snowing for three days straight in London, and I’ve never seen that before in the ten years I’ve been here. So, I was giddy like a child!

But yeah, so excited to discuss Breasts and Eggs. I really loved this book — it was so hard to put down. And especially given it’s Women’s History Month in the US and International Women’s Day takes place on the 8th of March, it makes sense. And as you might remember in last year’s introduction podcast, you might remember I mentioned how my love of literature deeply features Japanese women authors, and so it’s been exciting and slightly nostalgic or natsukashi feeling … This is my favorite word in the world, natsukashi. It just encompasses all the feelings of melancholy and memories that I just absolutely love. But I felt that reading this book.

And I feel it’s very fitting to discuss this book in March, especially after the issues we saw in the news surrounding the former Tokyo Olympics Chair and former prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, where he made disparaging remarks about women in meetings, leading him to have to step down and eventually be replaced by one of Japan’s celebrated female Olympians, Seiko Hashimoto, who is actually a former seven-time Olympian in speed skating and track cycling, as well as a Parliamentarian.

And of course in 2019 and over 2020 we learned about the #KuToo movement, which is Japan’s #MeToo movement, where I understand the Ku is a play on two Japanese words kutsu, which means shoes and kutsuu, which means pain, that started when Yumi Ishikawa highlighted that women, especially in the service industry, were being required to wear high heels all day long as a job requirement, while similar painful requirements were not asked of men. Unfortunately progression on this topic and the petition around it have not moved forward by much, but it has sparked the conversation about gender roles and social conformity in Japan, both topics that take prominence as themes in this book.

And while this book is set in Japan and speaks to the experiences of women in Japan, I also feel it’s so relatable to women’s experiences outside Japan as well, which I think will resonate with a lot of the foreign readers.

But I also think it’s key to note that this is novel, at its heart, about a working class woman in Japan, navigating her life and circumstances to make a choice that’s right for her, and in following her journey, we’re introduced to a number of themes that affect women on a daily basis.

So, kicking off, let’s start with the title, Breasts and Eggs. This was a really interesting title for me and to actually read the original Japanese title. When I first saw it, I always thought chichi meant father, but then I realized that if I looked at it in a different kanji, it means milk and therefore the slang for breasts.

V: Huh …

T: Yeah, which I thought was interesting because you don’t learn that in school. And the same for ran — I learned egg as tamago, however even though it’s the same kanji, ran is the onyomi for reading, which I believe is the Chinese reading for it rather than the Japanese reading for it. And I’m curious to understand more about Kawakami’s word choice for the titles. For example, did she pick those readings in order to evoke a particular emotion or sentiment when one reads the title in Japanese? Because I remember when I first saw the title in English at the bookstore I thought, Wow, this is to the point! and was super intrigued to understand what the book was about.

But I’m also really happy she extended the novella into a longer novel. Because, like I said, this was a really difficult book to put down because I was very invested in the characters and the story.

V: Thank you so much for starting us off with that background, which is just so helpful for me and I’m sure for some of our listeners who may not be as in tune with current events in Japan.

And I do want to give a shoutout to listeners from Texas, who’ll be launching their own book podcast called The Sunday Hustlerz Book Crew. They actually left a comment on our Instagram page, saying Kawakami “has pillared herself at the same height against Japan’s overcast of male authors,” and pointed out that Tokyo’s former governor, who also happens to be a novelist, Shintaro Ishihara, had described Breasts and Eggs as “unpleasant and intolerable.” So, I mean, to your point about how this book has become a part of the public conversation about gender roles and social conformity in Japan.

And I’m also glad that you understand Japanese and was able to catch that wordplay that was happening in the title of the book, which to me shows Kawakami’s sense of humor. And I do think that it is something that seems to have gotten a little lost in the Bett and Boyd English translation that we read.

But on top of that, you realize that there’s also the matter of the Osaka dialect, which the narrator Natsuko’s friend Rika describes as “talking a million miles an hour, getting everything in there … so much going on — multiple perspectives, mixed tenses …” And, I did get a sense of that in the English translation, which is full of long, run-on sentences and the past perfect tense, which I don’t encounter that much.

But the Osaka dialect is also a marker of class and culture. And I thought it was interesting that apparently, an excerpt of Breasts and Eggs was published in 2012 by a different English translator, Louise Heal Kawai. And, in the preface to her translation, Kawai spoke about the parallels between her hometown of Manchester in the UK and Osaka in Japan, where the novel takes place. They’re both industrial towns where locals have these distinctive accents and dialects, what Kawai observes “as sounding rather rough or unsophisticated,” where “Mancunian (adjective meaning “of Manchester”) is to my ears a perfect rendering of Osaka dialect.” So, I found that very interesting.

And actually her translation sounds very different from the Bett and Boyd, and it’s hard for someone like me who doesn’t know Japanese and then the nuances of Osaka dialect to sort of get a sense of which version is closer to Kawakami’s voice. So, for example, the first part of the book is narrated by Midoriko, through Midoriko’s journal.

And this is what Bett and Boyd’s translation sounds like:

Mom and I aren’t really talking … All my mom ever does is research breast implants. I pretend like I’m not watching, but she’s too busy thinking about boobs to notice anyway. Is she serious? I mean, why? I can’t even begin to understand it. It’s gross … It’s so, so, so, so, so, so gross! So gross … I’ve seen it on TV and online. It’s surgery. They cut right into you. They slit you open so they can stuff you, literally. It hurts. What’s wrong with her? What the hell is wrong with her? She’s being an idiot, the biggest idiot.

And then compared to Kawai’s translation, which sounds like:

Me and Mum don’t talk much … Every day she’s researching this breast surgery crap, and I pretend not to be looking, but to put fake stuff in your chest just to make your boobs bigger? I can’t get my head around it, what’s it for? … I don’t get it. PUKE PUKE PUKE PUKE PUKE! I’ve seen it on the telly, and in photos too, they cut you open. Then they shove this thing in, and it’s dead painful. Mum doesn’t understand anything. She’s off her trolley, my Mum, daft, barmy, bonkers, thick as two short planks.

T: I know, it’s really interesting, isn’t it? Especially as the translators are also from different countries. You can kind of hear the difference in the Britishisms in Kawai’s translation — you know, the “daft, barmy, bonkers” — compared to the two more American voices in the Bett and Boyd translation. One of my regrets of my time in Japan was not spending more time in Southern Japanese cities like Osaka or Kobe, and my Japanese language capabilities definitely would not work to pick up on those points. so I’m so glad they’ve been discussed and would be very curious if any of my friends in Japan who are listening or friends outside Japan who speak Japanese, if they’ve read the Japanese version and have picked up on that Osaka dialect and feel within the story. So, if you guys have any thoughts and you want to share it with us on that point, it would be great to discuss and get some insights.

So, Vina, this book runs through a number of themes, which we’ll try our best to get through, because there’s a good number of them, and we don’t want to create too many spoilers where possible. But I think the first one to explore is Midoriko’s coming-of-age story, as I feel this ties in really tightly at the beginning with the title.

Most of this insight is given through her journal entries, following her thoughts about learning about puberty and how that connects to her story with her mother. So just to pick a few parts out of her journal without giving the whole story thread away:

Okay. So I’ve been eating eggs for my whole life. But today I learned that women have “ova,” as in “oval,” which literally means egg. How is it possible I knew about sperm first? That doesn’t seem fair.

Today in health class we talked about “menarche.” So basically, your first period. Pretty much everyone else has already had theirs, but that’s what we talked about, how it works and what’s happening in your body that makes you bleed … There must be plenty of girls who haven’t had their period yet, but I feel like I’m the only one left.

Once I start getting my period, every month, until it stops, blood is going to come out of my body. It’s terrifying … When it happens, I’m not going to tell Mum. I’ll hide it … The other day at school, between classes, I forget who, but someone was saying, “I was born a girl, so yeah, I definitely want to have a baby of my own eventually.” Where does that come from though? Does blood coming out of your body make you a woman? A potential mother? What makes that so great anyway? Does anyone really believe that? Just because they make us read these stupid books doesn’t make it true. I hate it so much … Once you get your period, that means your body can fertilize sperm. And that means you can get pregnant. And then we get more people, thinking and eating and filling up the world. It’s overwhelming … I’ll never do it. I’ll never have children. Ever.

And I think it’s really interesting how her thoughts through those pieces in her journal develop, and I wonder if part of that is her frustration at how her mother Makiko has to work so hard at the bar to keep their little family going, and that she feels she can’t do anything about it. But if Makiko never had her, then she wouldn’t have this extra mouth to feed or worry about augmenting her breasts … And it feels like this circular understanding for Midoriko — it’s not just what she’s going through via puberty, but it’s this sentiment tied into the financial situation, the poverty she and her mother are in, and that it’s almost a burden, so she doesn’t want to participate when she finally moves into puberty and into womanhood.

V: Yeah, I do think it’s interesting how Kawakami tells the parallel story lines of Midoriko going through puberty and just hating the way her body changes; meanwhile her middle-aged mother Makiko contemplates breast implants, as she hates the way breastfeeding Midoriko supposedly changed the shape and color of her nipples.

And there’s a scene in a bathhouse, a day before Makiko’s breast augmentation consultation, where she obsessively stares at the other women’s breasts and becomes obsessed with this older woman’s pink nipples, which to her are the ideal.

And she confesses to Natsuko that for a few months, she tried to bleach and peel the skin on her nipples with these expensive chemicals that made them “burn and itch like hell” just so she could admire how pretty her pink nipples looked in the mirror. And you could hear her self-loathing when she couldn’t keep that up. So, she says:

… the dark skin comes from melanin, and that’s in your genes. The hydro wipes the melanin out. But it’ll always come back … From the inside out. Because the melanin is always there. You can’t change that.

And it reminds me how Asia’s $7.5 billion-dollar skin-whitening market accounts for more than half of the global whitening product market. Growing up in the Philippines, I remember young women using this skin-whitening lotion, Eskinol, which I guess, like the popular South Korean brand Laneige, is supposed to evoke the whiteness of snow.

And just like the images on many of the brochures Makiko collected from all these different breast augmentation clinics, the ads for these skin-whitening products usually featured blond-haired white women, even though most Asians look nothing like them.

And you have all these American companies like Johnson & Johnson and Unilever create these products but only sell them in Asia and the Middle East, and so it perpetuates this white standard of beauty and a skin-based caste system that can really be traced back to colonialism.

And I think it’s just so great to see younger generations now fighting back against this kind of oppression and economic exploitation — there are the #MillennialMorena and #MagandangMorena campaigns in the Philippines and the “Ban Fair & Lovely” petition that was started by these Pakistani women, for example.

T: Yeah. Just going back a little bit, your juxtaposition of Midoriko’s puberty and Makiko’s desire to change her body is an interesting point. And I think it also has to do with the pressure that Makiko feels working at the bar to be beautiful. And I think this is alluded to in a couple places in the book, but the most poignant section for me is where Natsuko is trying to process why her sister wants to get her breasts augmented:

What had possessed Makiko to do this, at this stage in her life? … As a kid, whenever I saw naked women in the magazines that the kids in the neighborhood got their hands on, or saw a grownup woman expose her body on TV, I guess on some level I thought that someday all those parts of me would fill out, too, and I would have a body just like them … I never became the women I imagined. And what was I expecting? The kind of body that you see in girly magazines. A body that fit the mold of what people describe as “sexy.” A body that provokes sexual fantasy. A source of desire. I guess I could say that I expected my body would have some sort of value. I thought all women grew up to have that kind of body, but that’s not how things played out.

People like pretty things. When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value. But some people never experience that personally.

And so, I thought that this section was so interesting, because we see later on in the book that even one’s standing at work, in the case of Coco’s bar called Chanel, the most experienced hostess gets trumped for a younger, prettier hostess who isn’t even able to fully communicate with the bar’s customers because she is still learning the language, but she ends up getting paid more even though she is new to the team.

And just moving on to your second point around the cosmetics industry, I found it interesting during my time in Japan, especially as I received a lot of unsolicited advice on products that I could use to lighten my freckles (which I love, by the way; I would never get rid of them for anything and more keep popping up all the time, and that’s fine). But I remember a lot of commercials and products being geared to whitening and lightening — I mean, you just have to walk into any department store, or a Boots or CVS equivalent like Ainz & Tulpe or Matsumoto Kiyoshi, or even LOFT or Don Quixote, and there are sections that cater to that aesthetic.

But without going too off topic, this also features in African and Caribbean communities — and a lot’s been written about the topic of colorism and the impact on the Black community — where I would go into shops that cater to hair products I need and see variations of the Fair White skin lightener products on sale marketed to us as well, and I think this movement that we’re seeing that you’re referencing towards embracing natural, embracing yourself as you were made, your skin tone, your hair, your body, instead of conforming to a particular aesthetic is a good direction, and hopefully will reduce the use of those products, which are proven to be toxic not just chemically but also mentally.

So moving on … Another theme that flows through the book is the “burden of sex” so to speak, in both being a woman and the act of sex. And it was so hard to pick just one particular example here because there are so many really good ones, but I’m going to limit myself to two here that stood out for me.

The first one was when Aizawa realizes that his mom was forced to use a sperm donor by his grandmother, after he finds out from his paternal grandmother, through an act of spite, that he is not his father’s biological son. And he goes:

… At first, my mum was quiet, just listening, then she said, “Your grandma made me do it.” … I guess my folks had been married for years, with no children. My grandmother was always tormenting my mother about it … Still back then, there was no such thing a male infertility. When a couple couldn’t have a child, it was always the woman’s fault, no matter what. That’s the way everybody thought. For years, my mother had to put up with all kinds of things … Then at some point, my grandmother came to see her and said, “Before it’s too late, you should go to Tokyo and see a specialist. If you really can’t have children, then the only option left is going to be divorce” … What the hospital found was that my dad … had no sperm whatsoever.

And what’s sad is that his grandmother then forced his mother not to say anything about it, and used their connections to secretly use donor conception. But the grandmother enabled the subservience of his mother, lording this secret over her and him as a weapon, as if it was her fault and not her son’s infertility as to why they needed a sperm donor. But I do love what his mother says to him when he insists he needs to know who his real father is. And she says:

“At some point,” my mother said quietly, “Who cares who your father is? …You’re mine. I carried you for nine months. That’s where you came from. That’s all there is to it. What else matters?”

So in this complicated unpacking of his history, Aizawa remembers his non-biological father fondly, and realizes that even if he wasn’t biologically his dad, he was still very much a dad who loved him. And that he had a mother who sacrificed for him.

And I’m just going to jump in very quickly to the next point that stood out for me as a running theme, which for Natsuko is the question of sex as an act and how societal conventions around sex has complicated her life, but also put her in this position of having to choose happiness with a partner, or being alone, given her aversion to the act. And she says:

I stood there, pondering the question of sex. It went the only way it could … What did it mean to be incapable, or for that matter capable of having sex? I was a grown woman, sexually mature. I knew I wasn’t physically incapable. So what was stopping me? That wasn’t how my body worked. That part of me … it wasn’t made for that. It was a part of me, but that’s not what it was for … Of course it changed as I’d grown, but I’d had my vagina my whole life. No one expected me to use it as a kid, so why should I have to use it now? What’s wrong with that part of me staying the way it’s always been?

And I think it is a really interesting point here that Kawakami raises through Natsuko for this conversation. I mean, has anyone actually sat and thought critically, you know what, why can’t I be happy with another person without it, right? Aren’t we all more as human beings with something to give without sex? And I feel that’s the point that Natsuko’s character is trying to get across. So for me, these were two very key points that illustrated the burden of being a woman, the burden of being expected to reproduce, and the societal impositions that either come along with or enforce this burden.

V: This “burden of sex” is something we don’t really see discussed — at least in an introspective way — in books by cis-straight male writers. So, I’ve really appreciated the books we’ve been reading so far in this podcast for that reason. Actually, the beginning of this book reminded me about the book Hurricane Season, which we discussed in the last episode of Season 1. So, like Hurricane Season, Breasts and Eggs is also about poor and working class women struggling to survive, and not just economically but also from misogyny and violence within their respective societies. And I actually love that you found that interview at the Wheeler Center with Fernanda Melchor, the author of Hurricane Season, and Mieko Kawakami!

T: I know, it’s a good watch. Definitely, folks, check out the Wheeler Center, and it’s a really interesting interview.

V: We’ll drop the link in the transcript too ... And just to bring it back to Breasts and Eggs, one of the things Haruki Murakami — who’s probably the most popular contemporary Japanese author translated into English — is known for are the unexplained disappearances of women in his novels. But, he doesn’t really concern himself with what happens to the women and in his cases, seems more interested in exploring how those disappearances affect the men in his stories.

So, I thought it was interesting that in an early scene in Breasts and Eggs, the sisters Natsuko and Makiko are watching story after story of femicides on the news. Unlike Murakami, Kawakami tells us, in this very graphic way about what happens to these women — there’s a college girl who’s stabbed in the face, neck, chest, and stomach by a twenty-year old man; and a 70-year-old woman who was raped, chopped to pieces, and dumped in the garbage by an unemployed 19-year-old man.

But I think Breasts and Eggs leads us toward a more hopeful ending, at least for some of the women who are able to make something of the hand they’re dealt, which then creates opportunities they never could have imagined in the first part of the book. So, when we first meet Natsuko in the beginning of the book, she says:

I was born poor, and I’m still poor …

I’m still in the same apartment with the slanted peeling walls and the same overbearing afternoon sun. Surviving off the same minimum-wage job. Working full-time for not a whole lot more than 100,000 yen a month. And still writing and writing, with no idea of whether it’s ever going to get me anywhere. My life was like a dusty shelf in an old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages. The only discernible change was that my body has aged another ten years.

Spoiler alert — by Book Two, Natsuko has paid off her student loans, published a well-received short story collection, and by the end of the book is proofreading these galleys for her new novel and maintaining a comfortable lifestyle as a writer and single mother, but by choice.

And I feel like her niece Midoriko also goes through this similar arc. So, in an early journal entry, she writes:

So, I got in another fight with mom over money. This one was way worse than the last one. In the middle of everything, I asked, “Why do you even have me?” I ask myself that all the time, but it’s a horrible thing to say out loud, I know. It just came out. My mom must’ve been really mad, but she didn’t say anything back …

I know it’s partly my fault she has to work the way she does. Who am I kidding? It’s all because of me. I get so upset thinking about it. I want to become an adult, right now. That way, I can work hard and help with money. I can’t though — not yet … I’m almost in middle school. That means three more years before I can get a job. But I don’t want just any job. I need a skill. My mom never got a skill. That’s why I need one …

And then by Book Two, we see Midoriko attending college on a partial scholarship and saving up money from work to vacation with her steady boyfriend Haruyama on this beautiful, I mean I imagine it, Japanese art island Naoshima. And her aunt Natsuko observes that it’s

as if the strength of how they felt about each other produced a sturdy faith in how the world would operate … The world was there to make their dreams come true, and they could trust without a shred of doubt that it would make good on its promises.

So Midoriko goes from being certain that she’ll never have kids to being curious and excited about Natsuko’s pregnancy.

T: Yeah, and I love how that ties into what we talked about earlier about the title as well, kind of bringing us over that arc into how things change for her.

And if I go back a little bit, what was really interesting was reading about Kawakami’s interview with Murakami (who I understand is an admirer of her work). And she asks him directly about his portrayal of female characters in his novels. If I can share a part of that interview printed in English on Literary Hub under the article A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, with Murakami Himself, which we will provide a link to in the transcript as it’s a really good read, everyone. So, Kawakami asks:

MK: I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfill a sexual function. On the one hand, your work is boundlessly imaginative when it comes to plots, to wells, and to men, but the same can’t be said for their relationships with women. It’s not possible for these women to exist on their own. And while female protagonists, or even supporting characters, may enjoy a moderate degree of self-expression, thanks to their relative independence, there’s a persistent tendency for women to be sacrificed for the sake of the male leads. So the question is, why is it that women are so often called upon to play this role in Murakami novels? … Would you mind sharing your thoughts on that?

V: That’s really bold!

T: It is! It’s quite direct, isn’t it? And he responds, initially he says:

HM: This may not be the most satisfying explanation, but I don’t think any of my characters are that complex. The focus is on the interface, or how these people, both men and women, engage with the world they’re living in. If anything, I take great care not to dwell too much on the meaning of existence, its importance or its implications. Like I said earlier, I’m not interested in individualistic characters. And that applies to men and women both.

It’s interesting when you go through this interview with the two of them because Kawakami sort of pushes the question a little bit more — quite gently, but she is direct in her points. To the point that I think Murakami finally understands what she’s getting to, and he does explain a bit further as the conversation goes, and he says:

HM: Right. I do feel that women have rather different functions from men. Maybe it’s cliché, but this is how men and women survive — helping each other, making up for what the other lacks. Sometimes that means swapping gender roles or functions. I think it depends on the person, and on their circumstances, whether they see this as natural or artificial, as just or unjust. Whether they see gender differences as involving stark opposition, or being in harmonious balance. Perhaps it’s less about making up for what we lack, so much as cancelling each other out. In my case, I can only tackle these complicated questions through fiction. Without demanding it be positive or negative, the best that I can do is approach these stories, as they are, inside of me. I’m not a thinker, or a critic, or a social activist. I’m just a novelist. If someone tells me that my work is flawed when viewed through a particular ism, or could have used a bit more thought, all that I can do is offer a sincere apology and say, “I’m sorry.” I’ll be the first guy to apologize.

And I thought that was quite an interesting point to note in this conversation, especially as we talk about Kawakami and Murakami and trying to understand a little bit about how Murakami develops his characters or thinks about his characters, especially in relation to Kawakami’s question.

But I also want to move onto another theme that I picked up and I think most of us experience on a regular basis, and those are the themes around impostor syndrome and “mansplaining.”

So, for example, it seems to take Natsuko a while to realize how talented she is and that she deserves to be described as a writer. When Makiko and Midoriko are visiting, Makiko explains to Midoriko that Natsuko is a writer and how cool it is, like a proud sister, but Natsuko downplays it as if she doesn’t deserve it. And she says:

“No it’s not. It’s not.” I was almost angry. “There’s nothing cool about it. It’s just something I like to do. As a hobby.” … I felt awful, even wounded, after hearing myself call my work a “hobby.” The question of whether the thing I was writing qualified as a novel was open for interpretation ... At the same time, I was sure I was writing a novel. Absolutely sure … But I knew that it was wrong to dismiss my work like that. It felt like I had said something that I could never take back. Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work. I’m absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do. Even if it turns out that I don’t have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there’s nothing I can do about this feeling. I can’t make it go away … But what I do know, as much as it hurts to admit, is that ten years after leaving behind Makiko and Midoriko, and coming to Tokyo to become a writer, I have nothing to show them, and have no way of making their lives easier. It made me feel small and useless. To be honest, I was scared and unsure.

And I thought that was quite sad, because later on we learn that she’s actually a published author both with her novel or book of short stories and articles that she writes as a freelancer. And it made me realize how many times we put ourselves down, especially as women, not selling our accomplishments when we have accomplished so much. I know I do this often! But there is a point she particularly notes in terms of her interaction with a male editor that also stuck for me. She says:

I moved to Tokyo to become a writer when I was twenty. Thirteen years later, when I was thirty-three, I won first prize in a contest run by a minor publisher. I could now say I was a writer … I spent two years working over what I had written with this male editor, who forced me to practically re-write the thing more than once … I gave it everything I had, summoning all the confidence that I could muster, but it seemed as though this guy was already convinced my work lacked any merit whatsoever … At first I assumed he was right, his opinions were important, but once I gave myself permission to be skeptical, I realized that he was full of crap. We weren’t talking about my work at all …

I love that bit — “once I gave myself permission to be skeptical.” And it really made me think of these interactions with some of the male characters in the book, who are constantly talking down or dismissing her work and “advising her,” unsolicited advice on what she should actually be doing. For example, in her recount of her last conversation with her ex-boyfriend Naruse after the huge earthquake in 2011, he says:

“Hey, though, weren’t you writing a column in some magazine?” he asked. “About whatever you’ve been reading, crap like that … Why are you wasting time on stuff like that? I mean — you’re supposed to be a writer now. Is that really the best way for you to use your platform? In times like these, isn’t there something more meaningful for you to write?”

V: Ugh! Sorry …

T: I know, I know! I felt very frustrated for Natsuko, being on the end of that conversation …

V: Well, I’m glad he’s an ex!

T: Right? And what’s crazy about it is that even though she explains to him that she had already written several articles on the earthquake, he dismisses it and tells her she’s not doing enough and that he’s doing more on Facebook and his blog … Which actually, not too shortly after that, he has a child, and then he starts to abandon Facebook and his blog. And that got to me, because it happens all the time and is frustrating. If he tried harder he would have found her work on the earthquake, and if he were a true friend who respected her work he would have been happy for all of the various forms that her writing manifests. Telling her how she should be using her platform and shaming her for it — like I said, I felt very frustrated for her.

V: Ugh — yeah, that was total mansplaining! But, thanks for mentioning that interview between Kawakami and Murakami, which kind of redeems him a little for me … I have to go back to read it now. I love that discussion they have about gender roles as well.

And just to bring it back to the book, I thought it was an interesting contrast that Kawakami makes between women like Natsuko and her friend Rika who are forced to or choose to work and the women who follow a more traditional path of marrying, having children, and taking care of their in-laws, like Natsuko’s other friend Rie.

I kind of felt terrible for Rie, who seems just as intelligent and level-headed as Natsuko, but who marries a pretty traditional man who comes from an even more traditional family. She supports her husband through his clinical depression, even agreeing to move back to his hometown and serve both her husband and her in-laws. But he really doesn’t return that respect or emotional support. Rie had post-partum after giving birth to her daughter, but instead of helping her through it, her husband chastises her:

He was like, “What’s wrong with you? Having a child is a totally natural part of being a woman. How could it possibly take that much out of you? My mom did it. Every woman does it. Get over it,” he said. Just laughing …

And I kind of love how Rie imagines standing over her husband, in real pain at his deathbed, telling him the same thing, “Dying is totally natural. Get over it.” It’s a humorous reaction, but it’s sad at the same time to see someone who’s clearly a very spirited person just be extinguished by these familial burdens.

T: That’s so true, and I love Rie for that. Throughout the book, she seems so quiet when she’s meeting up with the group of women, and then once she and Natsuko are on their own, you really get to see who she is as a person and she’s got that fire, that spirit, as you mentioned.

And it’s so true — some of the women’s stories we get to follow in this novel really showcase some of the various and systemic ways in which societies place burden on women. There’s a section of that conversation with Rie that also stood out for me as incredibly raw and poignant. And it’s this part when she starts talking about her relationship with her parents, and how she hated her mom for being so subservient to her abusive father, and in particular she notes:

Maybe I’m just cold-hearted … My mum never hit me or anything. She raised me well enough, and I still hated her … Let’s start off with how she viewed my dad. He was your typical king of the hill. We couldn’t say anything growing up. I was a kid, and a girl on top of that, so he never saw me a real person. I never even heard the guy call my mother by her name. It was always Hey you. We were constantly on red alert because my dad would beat the shit out of us or break things for no reason … My mum was my mum, always laughing it off, running the bath for him, cleaning up after him, feeding him. She looked after both of his parents all the way to the end, too. There was no inheritance, either. Yeah, my mom was free labour — free labour with a pussy.

And of course Natsu is super taken aback by this raw description of what her mom is, but Rie’s directness is necessary to convey further on the painful sentiment that her mother actually stayed with and chose her abusive husband over her kids because she felt children could always be replaced. And that was a powerful and painful point to read but a reminder that there are many women who find themselves trapped in abusive marriages or relationships, where they are seen and treated as less than nothing but free labour and a reproductive resource. And unfortunately there are many ways in which society reinforces this.

I mean, when you look at the increase in domestic violence over the pandemic and the lack of resources to help survivors escape or forge paths on their own, you can connect the dots. Additionally, a number of articles have been published (through UNWomen, McKinsey, Deloitte, Forbes, WaterAid, the BBC, The Guardian, etc.) noting the negative impact of the pandemic lockdown on women and any social and professional gains that may have been made pre-pandemic for example, the McKinsey feature on the impact notes in detail that “Women are more vulnerable to COVID-19–related economic effects because of existing gender inequalities.’’ And for everybody out there that’s curious about this, we will have a number of links in the transcript if anyone is interested in exploring that further.

V: That’s great, and I look forward to reading them as well. And, I mean, Kawakami really packs a lot into this novel, and it left me with so much to think about afterwards. She really does explore womanhood from all these angles — from their physical bodies and the mechanics of reproduction; to the various ways that women are oppressed, socio-economically and culturally; and also to the ways they rebel in small and large ways against the norms and expectations that keep them down.

Once again, we could talk for hours about the different characters’ life journeys — because there are so many characters in this book as well — and all of the larger ideas in the book, but why spoil the experience for readers? And hopefully, this conversation has inspired you to pick up Breasts and Eggs if you haven’t already read it. And just a reminder, you can purchase the book, along with all the other books we’ve discussed on the show on bookshop.org/shop/theliftuppod.

And to close out, we do want to give you a heads up on what we’re reading in April, which is of course National Poetry Month in the US. We are reading two powerful books of poetry — The Tradition by Jericho Brown and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (a personal favorite) by Ocean Vuong. So, feel free to send us questions or suggestions through our Instagram page, which is again @theliftuppod, and thanks so much again for listening to us here at The Lift Up Podcast!

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