In Breasts and Eggs (乳ト卵 in the original Japanese) by Mieko Kawakami (川上未映子), I was continually struck by Kawakami’s ability to write nostalgia — to write various dimensions of subtle emotions and ideas, actually. Tied up in the main character, Natsuko’s, contemplations of having a child are her re-inhabitations of her own childhood, and the simultaneous trauma of poverty and joy of her matriarchal family. One passage is especially poignant for me, when Natsuko and Midoriko (her niece) ride on a ferris wheel:
“The tops of her cheeks and the tip of her nose were red from all the sun, but now they caught the blue of evening. This happened once — a million years ago, when I was her age . . . on a ferris wheel just like this, looking down over the city. Climbing high into the evening, blue lapsing into black . . . I tried to picture our mom waving us goodbye once we pushed off, to see the wrinkles on Komi’s hands — but the more I reached for them the further away they slipped, blurring into obscurity . . . Who had been there with me, as a kid, when I watched the sky and city slipping into night? Trying to remember made me doubt it ever happened. Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe the mix of smells and images and feelings lined up perfectly, in such a way that they appeared to be a memory, but I had never actually been in real life with someone, watching the sky and city slipping into night” (119).
Such experiences of memory, I believe, occur for everyone at some point; but I particularly felt connected to Natsuko’s emotions, as I often observe the memories of my own past in Osaka, envisioning my grandmother standing at her house gate waving goodbye, getting smaller and smaller as we drive toward the airport. Did her face betray her sadness? Her disappointment? Probably not; she was stoic, as ever, when it came to painful experiences. I understood some of Natsuko’s pain in remembering her mother’s self-sacrificing hard work — a sacrifice for her children. How many kids feel the sharpness of remembering their family’s pain?
Yes, much of this story is about pain, but it’s also about realizing one’s true desires in both senses of the word “realizing”: understanding the desire and manifesting that desire. In the end, Natsuko does both. Still, there remains a sense of uncertainty in the outcome. That is what I call “realistic,” and is among the aspects of this novel that I appreciated. This story will urge the reader to dig deep into her own desires, question what it means to bring a being into the world, and contemplate the nature of relationships with family and friends.
Bonus notes:
- I loved that Natsuko is from Osaka and that Kawakami writes about Osaka culture and dialect (Kawakami herself is from Osaka). The city truly has its own subculture within Japan. Reading this book in the original Japanese would be a better experience for reading the subtleties of dialect — perhaps a goal for me in the future. This book really shed light on the limits of translation, and why Japanese books translated into English often have a subdued nature: that’s the difference between the Japanese and English language, and changing that subdued / somewhat passive tone into American-English directness would change the story entirely
- Multiple times, other characters mistake Natsuko’s real name for a pen name (Natsuko Natsume). I’m still trying to work out the significance of this misunderstading. The family name, Natsume, is likely a nod to famed Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki. But I think there’s more to it— I’m realizing that the timeline of the book is marked by the summers, and “natsu,” the first character of Natsukos’ first and last names, means “summer.” This perhaps has something to do with the authenticity of Natsuko’s desire to have a child, and the physically uncomfortable, sometimes suffocating nature of summers in Japan.
