Breasts and Eggs

Description

Breathtaking' Haruki Murakami, international bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles On a hot summer's day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko's teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother's self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsuko's rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another. Eight years later, we meet Natsuko again. She is now a writer and ?nds herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer and her family's past as she faces her own uncertain future. In Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them. This is an unforgettable full length English language debut from a major new international talent. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

Mieko Kawakami started her career as a singer songwriter. Her first novella My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, published in 2007, was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Japan, and was awarded the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers. Her second novella Breasts and Eggs won the Akutagawa Prize and sold 250,000 copies. Kawakami's first full-length novel, Heaven, won the Ministry of Education's Fine Arts Award for Debut Work, as well as the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. Her collection of short stories Dreams of Love, Etc won the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize, and her collection of prose poems "Sentan de sasuwa sasareruwa soraeewa" (2006) was awarded the Nakahara Chuya Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for Japanese poetry.

Mieko Kawakami lobbed a literary grenade into the fusty, male-dominated world of Japanese fiction with 'Chichi to Ran'('Breasts and Eggs') * Economist * I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami's novella Breasts and Eggs . . . breathtaking . . . Mieko Kawakami is always ceaselessly growing and evolving. Perhaps someday she will return to the nearly perfect, natural primal world of Breasts and Eggs. -- Haruki Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles 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 * So finely crafted, every few lines could be a haiku, and you almost forget how difficult it must have been to create something so perfectly simple. And when you notice the clarity, meditativeness, eccentricity, quirk and wit in her writing, you immediately understand how Murakami could be inspired by a writer like this. -- Praise for Ms Ice Cream Sandwich * Ladies Finger * Kawakami is emerging as one of Japan's most prominent young literary voices, with thoughtfulness and eccentricity at the heart of her prose. * Culture Trip * The novel details the lives of three women: the 30-year-old unmarried narrator, her older sister Makiko, who's obsessed with getting breast implants and her daughter, Midoriko. With humour and compassion, Kawakami explores female oppression in Japan, reproduction rights and motherhood. * Now Magazine *