Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami [Book 1 Review]
I was intrigued by the title. Then by the Goodreads review that stated that the book highlights women’s ongoing repression in Japan and the possibility of liberation, poverty, domestic violence, and reproductive ethics. I had to see what it was about.
The central figure here is Natsu, the narrator. The story starts with Natsu waiting for her sister and niece, Makiko and Midoriko, at the Tokyo station. Tokyo is the city where Natsu came as a young woman to build a new life as a writer. Osaka is where her sister and niece continued to stay. They were visiting her for three days. As the story progresses, we learn more about each character, their past, and how their lives looked like for the sisters as they grow up trying to make ends meet. The author goes into vivid details about the neighborhood and what it meant to be poor.
Their father was there one day and disappeared the next. He was described as a small, lazy man (but nevertheless a powerful presence; such is the hold of patriarchy in the society). His disappearance is liberating to the three women. The sisters, along with their mother, move in with their grandmother. When both their mother and grandmother die, the sisters are left to fend for themselves.
“Most of what I remember from back then is from the bar. A little place run by a friend of my mom. Mom worked a couple of jobs during the day and worked at this bar at night. Makiko was in high school then and started there before me, washing dishes. Pretty soon I started working in the kitchen, serving sake and bar food while Mom kept the customers company. Makiko picked up a second job at a yakiniku restaurant and worked as hard as she could.”
You could tell the sisters were close. At a later point in the book, Natsuko recollects a memory and narrates it to her niece. As a child, her family couldn’t afford to send her on a school field trip that she was very much looking forward to. The disappointment of not going made her cry and cry until Makiko came up with a surprise. She scattered clothes all over the place and carried Natsuko. Together, they grabbed at clothes hanging off the cabinets, on top of the lampshade, poking out from the drawers, like how they would pick grapes. Natsu believed that she owed Makiko the world.
In the present, Makiko is a single mother (still working in the bar, working herself to death), nearing forty. And she is obsessed with getting breast implants. That’s all she ever talks with Natsuko. And that’s the primary reason she is visiting Tokyo. Listening to her sister talk about the extensive research she had done on the best way to go under the knife, her sister feels depressed. Maybe something akin to pity.
“It was the same feeling you get at a train station, or in a hospital, or on the street, when you stop a safe distance away from someone who can’t seem to help but talk and talk, whether or not anyone is there to listen. Watching Makiko carry on like that, that’s how I felt.”
She is not able to comprehend why Makiko would so enthusiastic about implants. You would think she had other priorities. More pressing matters to worry about. Where was her life taking her? How was she doing financially? What about her daughter?
It also leads her to contemplate her views about her own body.
“As a kid, whenever I saw the naked women in the magazines that the kids in the neighborhood got their hands on, or saw a grownup woman expose her body on TV, I guess on some level I thought that someday all those parts of me would fill out, too, and I would have a body just like them.”
Didn’t we all get influenced by the women we saw on TV? We set expectations for ourselves, and not meeting it caused a lot of anguish. I remember how I cringed at a pimple, scared that it will mar my face, or how I read remedies that will help lighten the stretch marks across my body. Self-acceptance is not a lesson anyone teaches you. In fact, some may never learn it and live a life of insecurities and crippling anxiety that one is not good enough.
I think I understood why Makiko wanted her breasts to look pretty. It’s the ridiculous idea that beauty equals happiness. And we all want is to be happy.
While Makiko gets carried away by her frenzy, we get glimpses of what her daughter thinks of it.
“All my mom ever does is research breast implants. I pretend like I’m not watching, but she’s too busy thinking about boobs to notice anyway. Is she serious? I mean, why? I can’t even begin to understand it. It’s gross, I really don’t understand. It’s so, so, so, so, so, so gross. So gross.”
Midoriko, after a fight with her mother over money, decided it’s best if she didn’t talk to her (it’s been six months). She communicates with both Natsuko and Makiko through written notes. We get to know her thoughts about how she feels about puberty, her mother, and their lives through her journal entries. Mostly, she is left with questions and no answers.
“Today I learned that women have “ova,” as in “oval,” which literally means egg. How is it possible I knew about sperm first? That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Get this. Jun totally freaked out because she realized she’s been wearing her pads backwards this whole time. OK, maybe she wasn’t freaking out, not really. Part of what she said didn’t make sense to me, but apparently there’s a sticky part, and she had that part up against her body. I guess she didn’t realize. She knew something was wrong, though, like it wasn’t absorbing properly. I bet it stung like hell to pull it off. Is that the sort of thing you can really get wrong? Is it that hard to understand?”
Reading her entries made me recollect my childhood. I couldn’t remember who educated me about periods and what it meant. It definitely wasn’t my mom. Maybe I learned about it at my school. What I do remember is how freaked out I felt when I saw the blood in my underwear for the first time. I probably thought I was dying. It sounds funny now, but it’s tragic that children have to go through that. Alone and ignorant.
It’s remained a taboo topic. The pharmacy wraps pads in numerous newspapers and hands it to you in a black cover. Boys sneer when the biology teacher tries to explain the concept. When someone asks whether you are PMSing, it is asked to insult. What a freaking tragedy this entire dilemma is!
The Japanese culture didn’t seem that different from Indian culture. I felt for Midoriko. One one hand, she wants to grow up quickly so she can support her mom. On the other hand, she is resisting the changes that are happening to her body. She cannot understand how bleeding every month makes one a woman and translates to wanting to have kids of your own someday (I don’t understand this either). She draws examples from their own lives. She sees her mom working every night and sees what it does to her. When one life is hard enough to sustain, why make another one? She believes it was her mother’s fault that she was born. But then, whose fault was it that her mother was born?
“Once you get your period, that means your body can fertilize sperm. And that means you can get pregnant. And then we get more people, thinking and eating and filling up the world. It’s overwhelming. I get a little depressed just thinking about it. I’ll never do it. I’ll never have children. Ever.”
Parents carry the burden of bringing their children into this world. They can never be sure if their children will grow up to like the life that was forcefully given to them. This idea is explored more in the second book.
“Think about how great everything would be if none of us were ever born. No happiness, no sadness. Nothing could ever happen to us then. It’s not our fault that we have eggs and sperm, but we can definitely try harder to keep them from meeting.”
As the first part of the story nears its end, Makiko comes back home from her consultation, drunk. Completely hammered. She tries to confront her daughter, and the encounter leads to Midoriko slapping her. Midoriko decides to speak to her mother, and tearfully asks her to tell the truth. Makiko tries to brush it off.
“Midoriko stood there, staring at the floor. She was breathing heavier now. I figured she was on the verge of tears, but Midoriko looked up and grabbed the carton of eggs that I had left by the sink earlier — and ripped it open so fast that I barely saw it happen. She took an egg in her hand and raised it high over her head.”
There is an emotional breakdown. Both the mother and daughter are breaking eggs over their heads. Makiko doesn’t have answers to what Midoriko was asking.
“Why . . . “ she started, “do that to yourself . . . “ she spat out, breaking the second egg over her head, same as the last one. Yolk and white oozed down her forehead. Without hesitation, she grabbed another egg. “You’re the one who had me,” she told Makiko. “And it’s too late to do anything about that now, but why do you have to . . . “ Midoriko slapped the egg hard against her forehead.”
It’s a confrontation. But also a reconciliation.
The story ends with Makiko and Midorkiko leaving for Osaka.
This is a novel about women figuring out how they want to be women. It’s sadly relatable.
