Breasts and Eggs and the Question of Who Gets to Explain a Woman’s Body

A woman arrives in Tokyo from Osaka on a hot day with her twelve-year-old daughter, and the first thing she wants to talk about, before she has put her bag down, is breast augmentation. She has brochures. She has prices. She has been a hostess in a bar for years and her body is, in the most literal sense, her income, and it is changing in ways she did not agree to.

Her daughter has not spoken aloud to anyone for months. She writes instead, in a notebook, and what she writes is a horror of her own approaching puberty so exact and so unsentimental that it reads less like a child’s diary than like a field report from inside a body being taken over.

The woman whose apartment they are visiting, the narrator, watches both of them and says almost nothing. She is the younger sister and the aunt. She is thirty. She is trying to be a writer, working in a bookshop, living on very little. She has no opinion about breasts. She will, eight years later, have a very strong opinion about wanting a child and not wanting a man to touch her, and the second half of the novel is what she does about it.

This is Mieko Kawakami’s Natsu Monogatari, published in Japan in 2019 and in English the following year as Breasts and Eggs, in a translation by Sam Bett and David Boyd. The first part expands the novella of that name that won Kawakami the Akutagawa Prize in 2008. The second part, much longer, is new. Together they make a book that Moonlight reads not as a feminist manifesto, though it has been received as one, but as something more useful for our purposes: a book about who is allowed to explain a woman’s body to her, and what it costs to take the explanation back.

The novel’s architecture is simple and its content is not. Book One takes place over three days in a Tokyo summer. Makiko, the older sister, wants implants. Midoriko, her daughter, is refusing speech and writing furiously about eggs, about the fact that she was born carrying every egg she will ever have, about the obscenity of a body that was decided before she was. Natsuko, the narrator, watches, cooks, walks them to the public bath, and remembers their childhood in Osaka: the absent father, the grandmother, the poverty, the mother who worked herself to death.

Each of the three has been handed an explanation of her body by someone else. Makiko’s body has been explained by the bar: it is an asset, it is depreciating, and it can be recapitalised with surgery. Midoriko’s body has been explained by biology class and by the older girls at school, and she has understood the explanation perfectly and finds it unbearable. Natsuko’s body has been explained by absence: nobody has wanted to explain it, and so she has come to think of it as beside the point.

Kawakami does not adjudicate. She does not tell us whether Makiko should get the surgery. In the book’s most extraordinary scene, Makiko and Midoriko finally break, smashing eggs against their own heads in the kitchen, yolk running into hair, and the scene is not resolved so much as exhausted. The explanations have been screamed. Nobody has won.

This is the first thing the novel gives a reader: permission to find every available explanation of her body inadequate at once. Not the bar’s, not the biology teacher’s, not the silence’s. A woman in Japan who has been told that her body is her value, and also that her body is her duty, and also that her body is nobody’s business, has been handed three contradictory explanations and asked to live inside all of them. Kawakami puts the contradiction on the page and refuses to tidy it.

Book Two is where the novel becomes the book Moonlight is most interested in, and where it turns from bodies-as-explained-by-others to a body trying to explain itself.

Natsuko is now thirty-eight. She has published a book, is struggling with the next one, and has arrived at a want she cannot make fit any of the shapes on offer. She wants to have a child. She does not want a partner. She does not want sex; the novel is unusually direct about this, describing her past attempts as something she endured rather than something she failed at. She is not, in any framework the culture around her provides, a candidate for motherhood.

The path she considers is sperm donation, and here the novel does its most careful reporting. In Japan, donor insemination has been governed by professional-society guidelines that restricted it to married couples, and single women who wanted it have historically had to go abroad, or to informal arrangements online. Natsuko reads the forums. She attends a meeting for people who were conceived by donor and grew up not knowing. She meets Jun Aizawa, a man who has spent his adult life searching for the biological father he was never told about, and Yuriko Zen, a woman who tells Natsuko, with terrible calm, that bringing a child into the world is a gamble you make with someone else’s life, and that she herself was the losing side of that gamble.

The novel gives Zen the floor. Her argument, that to have a child is to inflict existence on someone who cannot consent, and that people do it for themselves and call it love, is delivered without irony and without rebuttal. Natsuko has no answer. She goes home and does not have an answer for a long time.

This is what makes the book something more than a story about a single woman getting what she wants. It is a book in which the want is examined by the strongest possible opponent and survives, not because it wins the argument, but because Natsuko decides she is willing to be the person who did this and stood behind it. In the end she does have a child, a daughter, with Aizawa’s help, and the birth scene is written with a physical concreteness that refuses both sentimentality and horror. The body, for once, is explaining itself.

It would be easy to enlist Breasts and Eggs as an authority. Kawakami herself has resisted that. In interviews around the book’s international publication she was careful to say that she was not writing a position paper, and readers who have used it as one have generally had to ignore Yuriko Zen.

The classification matters. This is a novel: primary text, one writer’s imaginative account, set in a specific decade in specific Japanese cities, with a narrator whose class position, poor, Osaka-born, self-educated, shapes everything she sees. Its observations about breast surgery, donor conception and single motherhood are observations, not findings. Where the novel touches real regulation, the restriction of donor insemination to married couples, it is accurate as of its setting but the law has been moving; a special act passed in December 2020 clarified legal parentage for children born through donated gametes to married couples, and the wider framework remains under discussion. A reader should not take the novel as a guide to what is currently possible.

What the novel can do, and this is why it belongs on Moonlight’s Books desk, is give vocabulary. Midoriko’s notebook gives a word for the specific horror of a body being decided in advance. Makiko’s brochures give a word for the specific humiliation of a body being priced. Natsuko’s want gives a word for the specific loneliness of wanting something that has no category, and for the specific dignity of pursuing it anyway.

Vocabulary is not authority. A woman who reads this novel and decides that she, too, wants a child without a partner has not been told by Kawakami that she should. She has been told that the want is sayable. What she does with a sayable want is her own business, which is precisely the novel’s point.

A woman in Japan reading Breasts and Eggs is reading a book that knows her structures from the inside, and that is both its power and its limitation.

The Osaka poverty of Natsuko’s childhood is not a backdrop. It is the engine. Makiko works as a hostess because it is the work available to a woman with her education in her city; her body is her income because the economy made it so. The novel’s much-discussed feminism is inseparable from its class analysis, and a reader who lives comfortably in a Tokyo suburb should notice that the choices Kawakami’s women face are not the same as hers, and that the novel’s honesty about money is part of why its honesty about bodies is credible.

The single-mother question lands differently here than in the countries where the translation was celebrated. Japanese single mothers have among the highest poverty rates of any household type in the industrialised world, a figure that recurs in government surveys and that the novel does not need to cite because Natsuko has lived it. When Natsuko decides to have a child alone, she is not making a lifestyle choice. She is choosing to enter a category that her own country treats as a problem to be managed. The novel knows this, and lets her choose anyway, which is a more serious kind of permission than the cheerful kind.

And the sexlessness is handled with a specificity that Japanese readers will recognise and international readers may miss. Natsuko is not asexual in the identity sense; she does not claim a label. She simply reports that sex has never been something she wanted, that she tried, that it was bad, and that she has stopped pretending. In a country where the phrase セックスレス has become a demographic category, where surveys by family-planning bodies regularly report that around half of married couples have not had sex in the past month, Natsuko’s refusal to pathologise herself is not a small thing. It is a woman declining an explanation that the culture has already written for her.

Tokyo, again, is not the whole picture. Kawakami’s Osaka is loud, poor, funny and female in a way that Tokyo publishing rarely lets in, and part of what the novel does for a reader outside the capital is confirm that a body that grew up in a two-room apartment above a shop has as much right to explain itself as one that grew up in Setagaya.

Breasts and Eggs was one of the most translated Japanese novels of its decade, and its reception abroad tells a story of its own.

For an international woman living in Japan, the novel can be a relief and a trap at once. A relief, because here is a Japanese writer saying, in a Japanese voice, the things about Japanese women’s bodies that a foreign reader has been told she is not allowed to observe: the pricing, the duty, the silence. A trap, because the international reception often flattened the book into “a Japanese woman speaks out,” as though Kawakami were reporting from an oppressed country to a free one, and as though the reader’s own country had already solved the question of who explains a woman’s body.

It has not. The specific mechanisms differ. The pressure on a Western woman in Tokyo to explain her own body may come less from a hostess bar than from a dating market that has already decided what she is, or from a medical system that will discuss her fertility in a language she cannot quite argue in, or from a family six thousand kilometres away who ask, every call, when. Kawakami’s novel is not a report on Japan for her benefit. It is a book about a condition she shares, told from inside a country whose version of the condition she is also living in.

Translation itself is part of the subject. Natsuko’s Osaka dialect, the warmth and aggression of it, is largely unrecoverable in English, and readers of the translation are reading a slightly more standard, slightly more Tokyo Natsuko than the one Kawakami wrote. A bilingual reader who can manage both will find that the two Natsukos explain their bodies in slightly different registers, which is, in its way, a demonstration of the novel’s thesis.

A serious critic has at least three complaints, and the novel is strong enough to hold them.

The first is that the ending softens the argument. Yuriko Zen’s case against having children is the most rigorous thing in the book, and the book answers it with a birth scene. Beauty is not a rebuttal. A reader who found Zen persuasive may feel that Kawakami changed the subject rather than winning the point, and that the novel’s final pages are doing, quietly, what Natsuko refused to let anyone else do: explaining her body to her, in this case as a body whose purpose was fulfilled.

The second is that Makiko and Midoriko disappear. Book One’s two most vivid characters are barely present in Book Two, and the novel that began as a triptych ends as a portrait. The question of Makiko’s breasts, which the first half made feel urgent, is never resolved, and Midoriko’s horror of puberty is left behind as a phase. The structure may be deliberate; it can also read as the writer losing interest in the bodies that were not hers.

The third is Moonlight’s own vulnerability. A business that offers bodily experiences to women has an interest in a book that tells women their bodies are theirs to explain. We should say so. The novel’s argument for a woman’s authority over her own body is not an argument for any particular use of it, and certainly not for a paid one. Natsuko, notably, wants less touch, not more. A reader should hold the book’s permission and Moonlight’s existence in separate hands and check that neither is being used to launder the other.

Our position, as a position: most of the explanations a woman has been given for her body were written by someone with an interest in the outcome, and the work of adulthood is not to find the true explanation but to notice who wrote each one and what they wanted.

Kawakami’s three women do that work in public. Makiko notices the bar wrote hers. Midoriko notices biology wrote hers. Natsuko notices nobody wrote hers and that the blank was itself an explanation: a body that was not worth the trouble.

What Moonlight offers, and this is its whole scope, is a bounded, agreed, private context in which a woman can take a reading of her own body that was not written by a bar, a spouse, a clinic or a market, including ours. The reading may be that she wants more touch. It may be, as Natsuko’s was, that she wants less. It may be that she wants to be seen without being handled, or handled without being seen, or neither, for now. A context that only produces one answer is not a context. It is a sales funnel with a nicer room.

The strongest objection to us is the one we raised above, and it stands. We are one more party with an interest. We try to be a party that says so, that writes the boundaries down beforehand, and that treats a woman’s “less” with exactly the seriousness it treats her “more.” Whether we succeed is for her to judge, in her own vocabulary.

Near the end of the novel, in labour, Natsuko stops narrating in sentences. The prose breaks into sensation. It is one of the few passages in contemporary Japanese fiction where a woman’s body is on the page without anyone, including the woman, standing outside it to explain.

That is the novel’s last gift and the one it cannot give directly. It can show a body explaining itself. It cannot do it for you.

The question it leaves a reader with is not whether she wants a child, or surgery, or sex, or none of them. It is smaller and older. Of all the things you have been told your body is, which ones did you write, and which ones did you only sign.