Breast and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Breast and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami; translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd
Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Europa Editions, 2020 Purchase @ Europa Editions |
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
Paperback: 192 pages; Hardcover: 176 pages Publisher: Grove Atlantic, 2018 Purchase @ [not available directly from publisher, so here’s a link to purchase from a Black owned bookstore in the Bronx] |
Review by Rachel Stempel.
Mieko Kawakami made an unforgettable entrance into the Japanese literary scene when her debut novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 2007. The following year, the novella version of what would become a novel and part of a three-book book deal with Europa Editions, Breast and Eggs, won the prize. Until recently her popularity was limited to a Japanese-speaking audience; however, this year saw the English translation of her extended Breast and Eggs, a masterpiece that effectively captures the worlds of its three protagonists—narrator Natsuko, her older sister, Makiko, and her niece, Midoriko. On a craft level, Breast and Eggs seems to do the impossible. Perhaps taking a cue from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove,” where the story unfolds over seven perspectives, Kawakami seamlessly delineates her characters and their desires.
We meet Natsuko, a self-proclaimed failure of a writer, living in Tokyo, while her sister and niece are visiting from Osaka. This is the first time they’ve all seen each other in years and we quickly learn of Natsuko and Makiko’s heart-wrenching past. Makiko, an aging hostess at a bar, is in town for a breast augmentation consultation. Her daughter hasn’t been speaking to her in months but communicates via a notepad—not to be confused with her journal, from which we’ve access to Midoriko’s thoughts on everything from friendship, genitals, her mother, and babies. In Book One, we spend a lot of time in Natsuko’s head, getting intimately acquainted with the glossed over sexism so inherent in Japanese culture and language. In one telling scene, the three are at a bathhouse when Natsuko recognizes a now-grown childhood classmate who’s seemed to have transitioned. She doesn’t recognize her staring as rude until the person’s partner snaps at her, at which point she chastises herself for understanding gender as a reflection of the body.
Book Two occurs ten years later, and we see Natsuko mulling over the same questions she had earlier when spending time with her sister and niece and reminiscing about their shared past: what is the imperative to procreate when life is full of suffering? Closure doesn’t come for Natsuko or the reader, and maybe we get lost in her circuitous thinking and posturing on the consumption of what’s considered a female body. What we do get is an honest portrayal of poverty in the developed world, of internalized struggle navigating expectation versus desire.
What makes Breast and Eggs a masterful work can similarly be said about Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, which also won an Akutagawa Prize in 2016. For context, when Breast and Eggs won, Tokyo’s right-wing governor and Akutagawa Prize committee member, Shintaro Ishihara, commented that the book’s narrator was “selfish” and “hard to listen to.” Convenience Store Woman received similar politically-driven backlash for its themes, namely the asexuality and non-conformist gender identity of its female-assigned protagonists.
Convenience Store Woman follows the life of Keiko Furukura, a middle-aged woman who’s spent her entire life working part-time at a local convenience store, always making up excuses for why she’s not moved on, like caring for a sick relative. On a surface level, this is about a woman who has been considered strange by friends and family since she was a child and her life decisions are for our comedic relief. Beyond that, Keiko’s obsession with her convenience store is brilliantly executed satire discussing the absurdity of Japan’s decades-long economic recession and Japan’s exhausting work culture. At one point, Keiko takes in a boyfriend by which I mean she makes arrangements with a man who’s fired from her store for stalking a younger employee and who considers himself involuntarily celibate. Their relationship, though a sham, is ridiculously toxic, but even bearing witness to the verbal abuse, Keiko’s mom is finally proud of her daughter.
Both Natsuko and Keiko are compelling, often erratic narrators who invite us into their worlds and give us often more than we want to know, but what’s particularly significant about Kawakami and Murata’s voices span beyond their prize wins.
Between 2008 and 2019, only 65 of the 225 Japanese novels in translation in the United Stated were written by women. This disparity doesn’t exist in Japan’s publishing industry, where sales and award wins are about equal. Translation is a difficult game in American publishing which already has a small profit margin, posing addition financial risks if an author to be translated doesn’t have an established Western audience. Mostly, though, it's about Western expectation, which for Japanese literature, has long been defined by the magical realism of Haruki Murakami. Nothing against Murakami, who considers Kawakami one of his favorite novelists, but it’s time for new voices to enter the Western sphere, voices that makes us uncomfortable with their jarring realism. Too often are women writers of all nationalities asked why their protagonists are “unlikeable,” when the issue is not unlikability but readers’ empathy.
Mieko Kawakami made an unforgettable entrance into the Japanese literary scene when her debut novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 2007. The following year, the novella version of what would become a novel and part of a three-book book deal with Europa Editions, Breast and Eggs, won the prize. Until recently her popularity was limited to a Japanese-speaking audience; however, this year saw the English translation of her extended Breast and Eggs, a masterpiece that effectively captures the worlds of its three protagonists—narrator Natsuko, her older sister, Makiko, and her niece, Midoriko. On a craft level, Breast and Eggs seems to do the impossible. Perhaps taking a cue from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove,” where the story unfolds over seven perspectives, Kawakami seamlessly delineates her characters and their desires.
We meet Natsuko, a self-proclaimed failure of a writer, living in Tokyo, while her sister and niece are visiting from Osaka. This is the first time they’ve all seen each other in years and we quickly learn of Natsuko and Makiko’s heart-wrenching past. Makiko, an aging hostess at a bar, is in town for a breast augmentation consultation. Her daughter hasn’t been speaking to her in months but communicates via a notepad—not to be confused with her journal, from which we’ve access to Midoriko’s thoughts on everything from friendship, genitals, her mother, and babies. In Book One, we spend a lot of time in Natsuko’s head, getting intimately acquainted with the glossed over sexism so inherent in Japanese culture and language. In one telling scene, the three are at a bathhouse when Natsuko recognizes a now-grown childhood classmate who’s seemed to have transitioned. She doesn’t recognize her staring as rude until the person’s partner snaps at her, at which point she chastises herself for understanding gender as a reflection of the body.
Book Two occurs ten years later, and we see Natsuko mulling over the same questions she had earlier when spending time with her sister and niece and reminiscing about their shared past: what is the imperative to procreate when life is full of suffering? Closure doesn’t come for Natsuko or the reader, and maybe we get lost in her circuitous thinking and posturing on the consumption of what’s considered a female body. What we do get is an honest portrayal of poverty in the developed world, of internalized struggle navigating expectation versus desire.
What makes Breast and Eggs a masterful work can similarly be said about Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, which also won an Akutagawa Prize in 2016. For context, when Breast and Eggs won, Tokyo’s right-wing governor and Akutagawa Prize committee member, Shintaro Ishihara, commented that the book’s narrator was “selfish” and “hard to listen to.” Convenience Store Woman received similar politically-driven backlash for its themes, namely the asexuality and non-conformist gender identity of its female-assigned protagonists.
Convenience Store Woman follows the life of Keiko Furukura, a middle-aged woman who’s spent her entire life working part-time at a local convenience store, always making up excuses for why she’s not moved on, like caring for a sick relative. On a surface level, this is about a woman who has been considered strange by friends and family since she was a child and her life decisions are for our comedic relief. Beyond that, Keiko’s obsession with her convenience store is brilliantly executed satire discussing the absurdity of Japan’s decades-long economic recession and Japan’s exhausting work culture. At one point, Keiko takes in a boyfriend by which I mean she makes arrangements with a man who’s fired from her store for stalking a younger employee and who considers himself involuntarily celibate. Their relationship, though a sham, is ridiculously toxic, but even bearing witness to the verbal abuse, Keiko’s mom is finally proud of her daughter.
Both Natsuko and Keiko are compelling, often erratic narrators who invite us into their worlds and give us often more than we want to know, but what’s particularly significant about Kawakami and Murata’s voices span beyond their prize wins.
Between 2008 and 2019, only 65 of the 225 Japanese novels in translation in the United Stated were written by women. This disparity doesn’t exist in Japan’s publishing industry, where sales and award wins are about equal. Translation is a difficult game in American publishing which already has a small profit margin, posing addition financial risks if an author to be translated doesn’t have an established Western audience. Mostly, though, it's about Western expectation, which for Japanese literature, has long been defined by the magical realism of Haruki Murakami. Nothing against Murakami, who considers Kawakami one of his favorite novelists, but it’s time for new voices to enter the Western sphere, voices that makes us uncomfortable with their jarring realism. Too often are women writers of all nationalities asked why their protagonists are “unlikeable,” when the issue is not unlikability but readers’ empathy.
Born in Osaka prefecture in 1976, Mieko Kawakami began her career as a singer and songwriter before making her literary debut in 2006. Her first novella My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, published in 2007, was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize and awarded the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers. The following year, Kawakami published Breasts and Eggs as a short novella. It won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary honor, and earned praise from the acclaimed writer Yoko Ogawa. Kawakami is also the author of the novels Heaven, The Night Belongs to Lovers, and the newly expanded Breasts and Eggs, her first novel to be published in English. She lives in Japan.
Sayaka Murata (in Japanese, 村田 沙耶香) is one of the most exciting up-and-coming writers in Japan today. She herself still works part time in a convenience store, which gave her the inspiration to write Convenience Store Woman (Conbini Ningen). She debuted in 2003 with Junyu (Breastfeeding), which won the Gunzo Prize for new writers. In 2009 she won the Noma Prize for New Writers with Gin iro no uta (Silver Song), and in 2013 the Mishima Yukio Prize for Shiro-oro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City). Convenience Store Woman won the 2016 Akutagawa Award. Murata has two short stories published in English (both translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori): "Lover on the Breeze" (Ruptured Fiction(s) of the Earthquake, Waseda Bungaku, 2011) and "A Clean Marriage" (Granta 127: Japan, 2014).
