The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki Murakami as Japan’s most important contemporary novelist, WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE.
"Breasts and Eggs" took my breath away.” — Haruki Murakami
Challenging every preconception about storytelling and prose style, mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, Mieko Kawakami is today one of Japan’s most important and best-selling writers. She exploded onto the cultural scene first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and is now an award-winning novelist. Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.
It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Her silence proves a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and frustrations. On another hot summer’s day ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless.
Kawakami’s first novella My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, published in Japan in 2007, was awarded the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers. The following year, she published Breasts and Eggs as a short novella, and won praise from Yoko Ogawa and Haruki Murakami. The expanded Breasts and Eggs is her first novel published in English.
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2020
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“One of Japan’s brightest stars is set to explode across the global skies of literature... Kawakami is both a writer’s writer and an entertainer, a thinker and constantly evolving stylist who manages to be highly readable and immensely popular.” — Japan Times
“Mieko Kawakami lobbed a literary grenade into the fusty, male-dominated world of Japanese fiction with Breasts and Eggs.” — The Economist
“I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami’s novella Breasts and Eggs... Kawakami is always ceaselessly growing and evolving.” — Haruki Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Mieko Kawakami is the author of the international bestseller Breasts and Eggs, a 2020 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the highly acclaimed Heaven, one of TIME’s Best Books of 2021. Her most recent novel is All the Lovers in the Night, which Hamilton Cain described as “her most accomplished novel yet” in Oprah Daily.
Born in Osaka, Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006, and in 2007 published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World. Known for their poetic qualities, insights into the female body, and preoccupation with ethics and modern society, her books have been translated into over twenty languages and are available all over the world.
Kawakami’s literary awards include the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize.
She lives in Tokyo.
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