Breasts and Eggs

by Mieko Kawakami

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 being that my body has aged another ten years.

It was my dream to make a living as a writer, but was this tendency of mine to come up with sentimental narratives everywhere I went helping me or getting in my way? I honestly had no idea. Would I ever? I had no way of knowing.

My monolithic expectation of what a woman’s body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to my body. The two things were wholly unrelated. I never became the woman I imagined.

SO GOOD

Beauty meant that you were good. And being good meant being happy. Happiness can be defined all kinds of ways, but human beings, consciously or unconsciously, are always pulling for their own version of happiness.

Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work. I am 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. I recognize that luck, effort, and ability are often indistinguishable.

Before I was even born, I already had everything I needed to have a baby of my own. In some ways, I was even more prepared than I am now.