Breasts and Eggs and the Right to Write Your Own Body

When a body is talked about, the subject of the sentence is very often not the person living in it.

Your chest is small. You are not young any more. You still have not had children. How can you care about something like that. How can you not care about something like that.

A body is supposed to be the place a person lives. Somewhere along the way it becomes the place where other people’s expectations settle, and the person inside it ends up as the object of a sentence somebody else is speaking.

Mieko Kawakami’s novel is about what accumulates there, and it is funny and painful in the same paragraph without separating the two. This is the second essay this Library has written about it. An earlier one read the novel as a question about who gets to explain a woman’s body. This one takes three things that piece leaves at the edges: the woman who wants to meet a child and does not want sex, the fact that every decision about a body in this book is also a decision about money, and the scorecard that is pinned not to a life but directly to a body.

The novel was published in Japan by Bungeishunju in July 2019 as Natsu monogatari. According to the publisher, it won the 73rd Mainichi Publishing Culture Award in the literature and arts division and was nominated for the 2020 Japan Booksellers’ Award. A bunko edition followed in August 2021.

It grew out of an earlier novella by the same author, which won the 138th Akutagawa Prize for the second half of 2007 and was first published in the magazine Bungakukai. The publisher describes the novel as a new story woven by the characters of that earlier book. Readers who know the novella will recognise two of the three women; readers who do not are not missing a prerequisite.

Sam Bett and David Boyd’s English translation was published by Europa Editions in 2020, and in the United Kingdom by Picador.

Those are the facts a reader might want before beginning, and this essay quotes nothing from the novel itself, in either language. What follows is an argument about the book, not a substitute for it.

The first part takes place in the small Tokyo apartment of Natsuko, who is thirty. Her older sister Makiko arrives from Osaka with her daughter Midoriko. Makiko wants breast augmentation surgery and has come to visit a clinic.

Makiko’s body arrives already crowded. It is the body of a woman who works nights in a bar, where appearance is not vanity but equipment. It is the body of a mother raising a daughter alone. It is a body approaching forty, whose youth, the one asset the culture had credited it with, is being drawn down. And it is the body she herself looks at, finding something missing.

It would be easy to file the surgery under vanity, or under doing it for men. The novel declines the shortcut, and the refusal is deliberate rather than coy. What Makiko actually wants is never made fully legible, not to her sister, not to the reader, and possibly not to Makiko.

What is legible is that her body has never once been treated as hers alone. Everyone in her life has an opinion about it, and the opinions arrived long before she had a chance to form her own.

Natsuko watches with a mixture of tenderness and bafflement, and the reader is placed in exactly her position. We are not asked to approve of the surgery or to disapprove of it. We are asked to notice how rarely Makiko has been asked what she wants, and how loudly everybody else has told her.

Midoriko has stopped speaking. She is not unable to talk. She has chosen to write instead, and her notebook runs alongside the adult narration like a second instrument.

What she writes about is a body that is starting to do things without asking her. Menstruation. Breasts. The mechanics of how people are made, which she looks at with a clarity adults have trained themselves out of. Her distress is not squeamishness. It is the recognition that a process is underway which she did not consent to and cannot stop, and which everybody around her treats as good news.

The silence is not a symptom. It is a strategy, and a precise one. If she does not speak, she cannot be answered, corrected, reassured or named. The notebook is an attempt to describe her own body before somebody else defines it for her, and to do the describing in a medium nobody can interrupt.

Set the two of them side by side and the symmetry is the point of the whole first part. The mother wants to add something to her body. The daughter is frightened that her body is adding things on its own. Their wishes look opposite and share a root: each wants her body treated as hers.

The second part picks up eight years later. Natsuko is thirty-eight and scraping a living as a writer. She begins to want to meet a child of her own.

The wish arrives with a condition attached that makes it, in most people’s ordinary reckoning, impossible. She does not want sexual contact.

In the usual arrangement of these things, those two facts are bundled. Wanting a child and wanting sex are assumed to travel together, so tightly that the assumption is invisible until somebody separates them. A combination like Natsuko’s therefore looks, from outside, like a contradiction that will have to resolve one way or the other before she can be taken seriously.

The novel does not treat it as a contradiction, and how it declines to is the most interesting thing in the book.

Natsuko’s lack of desire for sex is never traced back to a cause. No incident is offered as the reason. It is not framed as damage, not framed as a phase, and not framed as something to be treated so that the real wish underneath can proceed. She simply carries it, as a fact about her body, in the same register in which she carries the fact that she is thirty-eight.

An earlier essay in this Library put the general principle as: desire is not an instruction, it is information. Natsuko reads her own information without rewriting it for anybody’s convenience. Wanting a child is information. Not wanting sex is information. Neither has to be deleted to make room for the other.

It is worth naming the script the book is declining, because a reader will recognise it immediately and may not have noticed it was a script.

In that script, a woman who does not want sex is a woman with a problem, and the people around her set about solving it on her behalf. She has not met the right person. She is holding something back. She is frightened of something she has not identified. She will feel differently when the circumstances change. Each of these is offered kindly and each has the same structure: it treats her statement about herself as a symptom to be interpreted rather than a report to be believed.

Natsuko hears versions of all of it, including from people who love her.

What the novel grants her, and what the people around her do not, is the assumption that her account of her own body is accurate. That is a small-sounding gift and it is the whole argument. Once you assume a woman’s description of her own wanting is correct, every conversation about what she should do next has to start somewhere else.

It should be said plainly that the book gives Natsuko no diagnosis and no label of any kind, and a reader is free to read her without supplying one. To hear a person describe her own body as testimony rather than as symptoms is close to what this novel is asking of us, and it is harder than it sounds.

What stays with a reader afterwards is how often a passage about a body turns out to also be a passage about money.

Breast augmentation costs money. Having a child costs money, and so does not having one. Makiko’s work is work done with the body, and its hours are the hours that are available. Natsuko’s life in the first part is a life of knowing what is in the account without needing to check.

The English publishers describe the novel as a portrait of contemporary working-class womanhood, and that framing earns its place. The right to decide your own relationship to your own body is not distributed equally. The number of options a person has is set, to an uncomfortable degree, by what is in her bank book.

The book makes this concrete in small, unglamorous ways rather than as argument: the cost of a procedure weighed against rent, the price of a trip to Tokyo, the arithmetic of what a night of work is worth. None of it is dramatised. It is simply present underneath every decision, the way it is present underneath most people’s decisions and absent from most writing about intimacy.

So the novel never lets the sentence my body is my own harden into a slogan. It keeps showing how many conditions have to be met before a person is in a position to say it and mean it operationally rather than aspirationally.

Other essays in this Library have followed the way the word normal turns from a description into a scorecard: partnered or not, married or not, experienced or not, a mother or not.

This novel shows the same scorecard pinned one level down, directly to the body rather than to the life arranged around it.

Breast size. Whether you menstruate, and when you started. Your age. Whether you have given birth. Whether you feel sexual desire, and how much. Each of these is, in itself, only a state of a particular body, no more evaluative than height. On the scorecard each becomes a mark, and the marks are added up into a judgment about the person.

The way people look at Natsuko is the textbook case, and the sequence is worth spelling out because it is so rarely made explicit. If you want a child, first find a partner. If you have a partner, sex naturally follows. If you do not want sex, something must be wrong. The scorecard does not merely grade. It lays out a route, and anybody who steps off the route is offered language designed to guide her back onto it.

Notice also that the route is only ever inspected in one direction. Nobody asks the woman who has a partner whether she actually wants sex; that box is assumed ticked. Nobody asks the woman whose body matches the scorecard whether she chose any of it. The questions are reserved almost entirely for the person who has departed from the path, which is how a scorecard disguises itself as concern.

But a body is not alive in order to walk a route.

A reader who finds Natsuko’s wish selfish, or naive, deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal, because the objection is not stupid.

It runs like this. A child is not a want to be satisfied; it is a person who will have to live with the consequences of how they arrived. Natsuko is not wealthy, is not partnered, and is proposing to route around the ordinary means of conception for reasons she cannot fully articulate even to herself. Wanting to meet a child is a beautiful sentence and it is still, at bottom, a sentence about what she wants. Somewhere in there is a person who does not get a vote.

The novel does not duck this. It is in fact the question the second part is organised around, and Natsuko puts harder versions of it to herself than any reader is likely to. She meets people with direct experience of being conceived this way and is not permitted to treat their objections as noise.

What this essay would say to the objection is narrower than a defence. The scrutiny is legitimate; the distribution of it is not. The same scrutiny is almost never applied to a partnered couple who conceive in the ordinary way without having examined a single one of these questions. The route protects people from being asked. Stepping off it exposes a person to a level of interrogation that has nothing to do with the seriousness of her thinking and everything to do with the fact that she is visible.

So the honest position is not that Natsuko is obviously right. It is that she is doing the reasoning that the route allows most people to skip, and being judged more harshly for it.

The use a reader can make of this book is not a resolution, because the novel does not offer one. It is a question that can be carried out of it.

When a thought about your own body arrives, it is worth asking whose sentence it is. Not in a suspicious way, and not as an exercise with a promised result. Simply: is this description mine, or did I receive it?

Some of them are obviously received. A number attached to a part of a body, a comparison with somebody at work, an age at which something was supposed to have happened. Those tend to arrive with a voice attached if you listen for it.

Others are harder, because they have been held so long they have taken on the texture of a personal opinion. That is the useful edge of the question, and it is the one Midoriko is working at with a pencil, years before she has the vocabulary for it.

There is no correct answer waiting at the end of the question, and finding that a description was received does not oblige anybody to discard it. Some received descriptions are accurate and worth keeping. The point is only to know which ones came from outside, because a person who knows that is in a different position from a person who does not.

This house does not take from the novel a position on whether to have children, and it does not take a position on reproductive medicine. Those are not its subjects and it has no standing in them.

What it takes comes earlier than any of that.

A person is allowed to write her own relationship to her own body, in her own words. To want to be touched, or not. To want to change something, or to leave it. To want something, and to not want the thing that is assumed to travel with it. If the combination looks contradictory from outside, it remains a fact about that body rather than a defect awaiting correction.

That is what Midoriko was doing in the notebook: describing a body before somebody else could define it. And it is what Natsuko is doing when she declines to let her two facts be collapsed into one.

The novel can be read as the story of three women each trying, by a different method and with different amounts of money, to become the author of her own body. Which is why a reader may notice, next time she finds herself talking about her own, that the subject of the sentence has quietly become her.

This is a reading of a novel, not literary scholarship, and not a claim about the author’s intentions. Nothing from the novel or its translation is quoted anywhere, and the essay stays with the premise and the opening situation of each part rather than the developments or the ending.

Natsuko is given no diagnosis and no label here, because the novel gives her none. Neither is the reader. Nothing above is a description of any real person, and the scenes of ordinary life are constructed rather than reported.

No position is taken on reproductive medicine, on the ethics of any method of conception, or on whether anybody should have children. The counter-reading section states the objection to Natsuko’s wish at its strongest and answers it by noting the uneven distribution of scrutiny, which is a narrower claim than agreement with her.

The novel is not evidence about Japanese women, working-class women, unmarried women or any group. Three characters are three characters. No generalisation about Japanese society is offered or implied.

Publication facts come from the publishers’ own pages and from the prize registry, recorded in this essay’s evidence ledger. The Mainichi award is stated as the publisher states it. Bibliographic details that could not be confirmed against an accessible source are omitted rather than approximated.

The book is introduced for discovery. There is no purchase link, no retailer and no referral of any kind, and no service call to action appears in this text. Neither Mieko Kawakami, her translators, Bungeishunju, Europa Editions, Picador nor any other publisher endorses this house or knows of it, and this house’s reading is stated as a position rather than as the meaning of the book.