Breasts and Eggs
Ratings62
Average rating4
15
Ratings62
Average rating4
So amazing it took my breath away' Haruki Murakami, international bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles Breasts and Eggs explores the inner conflicts of an adolescent girl who refuses to communicate with her mother except through writing. Through the story of these women, Kawakami paints a portrait of womanhood in contemporary Japan, probing questions of gender and beauty norms and how time works on the female body. Breast and Eggs is a thrilling English language debut from Japan's brightest young talent, Mieko Kawakami.
Reviews with the most likes.
I loved this book's analysis and description of how being a middle age working class woman experience is like.
The descriptions were nice and soothing at first but sincerely, they became repetitive eventually.
Apart from that, I loved it. I think that It makes sense stylistically that Natsuko as a writer, is very detailed with her thoughts and Dead Eye is more simplistic.
I think it’s important for people to read books that are explicitly about experiences that they can not and will not have in their lives. It’s a great way to expand one’s horizons and I find that the process makes people more enlightened. This idea is what drew me to Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. The vast majority of Japanese books that I’ve read have been written by men and for men, with the women in these books either being nonexistent or totally unrealistic. Breasts and Eggs is the opposite of that. It is written by a woman for women with the majority of the characters being women and the entire focus of the book being on womens’ issues. That makes it a book that is very important for me as a man to read but one that I am unsure of how to review. Because I question what right I have to critique it. What I will do is lay out the facts of how I feel about this book in as matter-of-fact a way as I can possibly get.
I love it. I love pretty much everything about it. I love how it’s structured. I love how it’s narrated. I love the nuances of the characters. I love the questions it brings up. I love how some of those questions aren’t totally answered. I love the big emotional scenes. I love the more subtle parts. It’s a book that I feel is totally successful in what it is trying to do, which is about the highest praise I can give any novel. And those are the facts.
I have complicated feelings about this book. It occasionally dips into brilliance before grinding to a brutal halt again. The first half was genuinely engaging, and then you randomly crash into the most wildly transphobic scene in probably any recent novel not written by J.K. Rowling, and then the narrative moves on like it never happened.
