![]() ![]() The novel dropped like a bomb on the heavily male world of Japanese fiction, smuggling weighty questions into its breezy, discursive style. ![]() What are women’s options once they become mothers? Why are they chained to unreasonable expectations of their bodies? Maybe breast implants would give her the “kind of body that you see in girly magazines”. ![]() As younger women begin displacing Makiko in a workplace hierarchy determined by male desire, she begins to obsess over her nipples and sagging boobs. At its centre is Makiko, an ageing bar hostess and single mother to Midoriko, her reproachful adolescent daughter, who will only communicate with her in writing. Breasts and Eggs, originally written as a blog in the punchy dialect of her native Osaka, yanked working-class women off the literary sidelines, published in 2008. Kawakami has made her name articulating womanhood in Japan better than any living author. ![]() “Did the virus wipe out all the women? How could they know anything about what it is like to be a mother? They don’t even understand there’s a problem.” ![]()
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