Breasts and Eggs started life on a blog. Mieko Kawakami was a singer with three albums behind her who had started writing online to push her music, and the posts, written in the punchy Osaka dialect she grew up with, found a following of their own. Out of them came the novella that won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize in 2008, made her famous, and got her denounced by the governor of Tokyo.
The Mieko Kawakami guide explains the crucial thing about the book English readers buy under this title: it is not the novella that won the prize, but a much longer 2019 novel built from it. This page is about how the original came to be, the fight it caused, what the expanded novel covers, and the translation problem at its heart. It draws on the record rather than my own reading.
From Factory Floor to Literary Prize
Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976 and grew up in a poor, working-class family. She released albums as a singer-songwriter, began blogging to promote them, and built a large readership through the blog before she published any fiction.
Her literary debut came as a poet, followed in 2007 by a novella whose English title is My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, which took a prize for emerging writers. The following year came Breasts and Eggs, which took the 138th Akutagawa Prize and sold in numbers unusual for a literary novella.
The Governor Who Called It Intolerable
Not everyone was pleased. Shintaro Ishihara, then the governor of Tokyo and himself a former Akutagawa Prize winner, attacked the novella in a magazine article, calling its self-absorbed rambling unpleasant and intolerable.
It’s worth understanding what he was objecting to. The book talks plainly about breast surgery, menstruation, ovulation, and the bodies of working-class women, subjects Japanese literary fiction had largely handled at a distance or not at all, and it does so in a regional dialect rather than standard literary Japanese. The attack came from one of the grandees of conservative Japanese politics, and it did nothing to slow the book down. It went on to sell a quarter of a million copies.
What the English Edition Contains
The 2019 novel, published in Japanese as Natsu Monogatari, or Summer Stories, a pun on the narrator’s name, keeps the novella as its first half and adds a second half twice as long.
Book One is a Tokyo summer in 2008. Natsuko, a struggling writer from Osaka, is visited for a few days by her older sister Makiko, who works in a hostess bar and has come to the city to price up cheap breast augmentation, and by Makiko’s twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko, who has stopped speaking to her mother and communicates in writing. Midoriko’s notebook entries about puberty run between the chapters.
Book Two jumps ahead eight years. Natsuko has published a successful book, is stalled on the next one, and wants a child. She wants no partner and no sex, and Japanese fertility practice offers a single woman in that position no route at all, so she starts investigating what her options are. That research brings her to Aizawa, who campaigns for donor-conceived children’s right to know who their donor was, an argument that runs against how donation is handled in Japan, and to his partner Yuriko, who has her own reasons for doubting whether anyone should be brought into the world.
English-language publishers kept the original novella’s title for the whole thing, which is why the book you buy has a title that fits only its first half.
The Question Underneath It
Kawakami has said something useful about what she was doing: she writes from the child’s point of view, and what interests her is not motherhood but the shock of being alive at all, of being thrown into existence without warning and knowing it ends.
That reframes the novel. It looks like a book about whether a woman can have a baby on her own terms, and it is, but the harder question it keeps asking is whether anyone has the right to decide that a person should exist.
The Osaka Problem, and the Manchester Version
Here’s the thing most English readers never learn. Kawakami’s characters speak Osaka dialect, which in Japanese is immediately legible as informal, blunt, funny, and socially marked: not the language of literary fiction.
Sam Bett and David Boyd rendered it in standard English, which smooths it into something readable for a wide audience and loses the social signal entirely. An alternative exists. In 2012 the translator Louise Heal Kawai, who is from Manchester, published excerpts from the novella rendering the Osaka voices in Mancunian English, on the grounds that both cities have a reputation for being friendly, plain-spoken and a bit rough, and that both dialects get looked down on. The same translation workshop reportedly produced a Southern US version too.
Reviewers who know both are split. Some wish the whole novel existed in the Manchester version and call it brilliant. Others point out that any regional English would have alienated as many readers as it delighted, and that Bett and Boyd made the commercially sane choice. If you want to hear what the Japanese sounds like, the excerpts are worth hunting down.
The Honest Criticism
Two complaints recur, and they’re both about Book Two. The first is that it turns essayistic: long stretches of debate about donor conception in which characters state positions, which some readers find powerful and others find closer to a blog than a novel. One reviewer dismissed the whole thing as feminist chick lit, which the book’s admirers would call a category error, but the essayistic charge is fair. The second is that the prose reads unevenly in English, sometimes flat, sometimes clunky, which is partly the dialect problem above.
Readers who love the book tend to say the layers only pay off at the end, and that the depiction of Natsuko’s depression in the late chapters is exact.
The Writers Who Backed Her
The counterweight to Ishihara came from the top of Japanese fiction. Haruki Murakami said the book took his breath away and has described Kawakami as ceaselessly growing and evolving as a writer, and Yoko Ogawa praised the novella as well.
Kawakami’s relationship with Murakami is more interesting than a blurb, though. In a long published conversation between them, she pressed him directly on how women appear in his novels, which is not the usual register for a younger writer interviewing Japan’s most famous living novelist. If you want to see that exchange’s other side, my Murakami ranking covers the books she was asking about.
Reviewers greeted the novel as a landmark. Time put it among its ten best books of the year, the New York Times made it a Notable Book, and John Freeman compared it to Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters as a portrait of women across a generation.
Which Copy
There is one English translation, by Sam Bett and David Boyd, published by Europa Editions in the US in 2020 and Picador in the UK. The novella that won the prize has never appeared in English on its own.
Where to Go Next
Her next book in English is Heaven, a short, brutal novel about bullying that reached the International Booker shortlist in 2022.
The rest of her work in English is covered on the Mieko Kawakami guide. For the contemporary most often read alongside her, see Convenience Store Woman, and the best Japanese novels ranking places both.
