06/2024 Breasts and Eggs Group Read

[Selena]

Challenging every preconception about storytelling and prose style, mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, 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.

Discuss Breasts and Eggs here!

Reading Schedule
TBD

[Jack]

I listened to the audiobook reading by Emily Woo Zeller and Jeena Yi. I found it rather intense at the beginning, almost angry, but not out of context.
I later switched back to the text version. I did this the last time I read the book also. I think the reading of Midoriko worked the best for me and felt just right in listening to her in the audiobook.

When I reflected on my impressions of B&E and noticed how Kawakami Mieko cast her story around women's environments where men are basically, and maybe thankfully, absent. One of my original reactions to the book was "Isn't there any decent men at all in these character's lives?" I now realize that this was necessary for the author to address the issues she examines in the story.

That thread is also obscured by translation choices where a literate Japanese reader would probably get the framing very early in the story and we, at least an English audience, might not. Hitomi Yoshio wrote an essay on this on gendered spaces in this novel. I will provide information at the end of this note if someone wants to find it to read the full essay.

We all are likely familiar with Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own. Basically in this Woolf states that women novelists (of her time and before) have to find spaces to write in common areas of the home where they are constantly interrupted. A literary Japanese example would be Yosano Akiko (1878 – 1942). See the Wikipedia article for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosan...

Early in B&E, Natsuko describes the scene where she comes home, her father is gone, and she used her voice as if "my voice was new to me." She dances around the room. As she looks around, "I saw these things every day but now they gleamed, as if sprinkled with magic dust." Her father never comes back.

Later they have to abandon the apartment in the middle of the night. In this escape she leaves behind her backpack. Here is where we miss a key reference in the original book that doesn't make it to the English translation in a form that we get a very obvious, to the original reader, reference to Virginia Woolf's treatise.

Natsuko describes her backpack. "It was everything to me. My bag was like a private room I could take with me where I went."
I get this now that I understand the reference and then the story threads for especially Natsuko and Midoriko become clarified.

The description in Japanese for the backpack (randoseru) is that it functioned as "a room of one's own" (jibun dake no heya). This is the title of the Japanese translation of the Virginia Woolf by Shizuko Kawamoto. See Shizuko Kawamoto. I think this is the title in Japanese: 自分だけの部屋 (新装版) .

For me, when I then looked at the novel with the context of having private and gendered public space, the spaces helped the primary characters define themselves and perhaps, confront additional questions about their conceptions of self, for examples: the scenes in the public women's bath, and the conflict between the societal view of the female body and the difficult contrast with self image.

Hitomi Yoshio's essay is chapter 5 in Reading Desire in a New Generation of Japanese Women Writers

[Steven]

A tad late but finished the book! I picked it up because I saw the group was reading it and really liked it. I did notice how its basically two stories combined into one centered around the topic of the female experience. I like the themes explored and enjoyed the read overall. Its interesting to see these topics in relations to japan society.