Breasts and Eggs

by Mieko Kawakami

I’m sure she thought that she was only making conversation. I was worried I had sounded too defensive. But more importantly, I felt awful, even wounded, after hearing myself call my work a “hobby.”

I recognize that luck, effort, and ability are often indistinguishable.

I hadn’t heard Naruse’s voice since we broke up when we were twenty-three, but there it was, coming from my cell phone, exactly the way that I remembered it. No noise, no static. The call was clear, as if the last ten years had never happened. He spoke as if we were close—like he was picking up where we’d left off the day before.

How many more times in my life would I sit back like this and find myself transfixed by the blue of the evening? Is this what it means to live and die alone? That you’ll always be in the same place, no matter where you are?

“But trust me,” Rika said, laughing too. “There will come a time when women stop having babies. Or, I don’t know, we’ll reach a point where the whole process can be separated from women’s bodies, and we can look back at this time, when women and men tried to live together and raise families, as some unfortunate episode in human history.”

“Desire is a justification on its own. Even when it’s something that hurts others, you don’t need any reason. You can do whatever you want . . . It’s not like you need a reason to kill somebody or have a child.”

Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this other being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that’s what you want for yourself, and that doesn’t make any sense.”

“People are willing to accept the pain and suffering of others, limitless amounts of it, as long as it helps them to keep on believing in whatever it is that they want to believe. Love, meaning, doesn’t matter.”

Not like the world had changed while I was down with a fever. Of course it hadn’t. Still, even if nothing changed, the thought that no one on the planet knew that I’d been seriously sick for almost a week left me feeling alien.