Breasts and Eggs

Product Information

I was wondering about the men in menarche. Turns out it’s the same as the men in menstruation. It means month, which comes from moon, and has to do with women and their monthly cycle. Moon has all kinds of meanings. In addition to being the thing orbiting the earth, it can involve time, or tides, like the ebb and flow of the ocean. So menarche has absolutely nothing to do with men. So why spell it that way? What happened to the o? How old was she, though? Seventy? Older? Wait, hold up. That means she was the same age as Komi. She gasped at her own statement and opened her eyes wide. And she was raped, right? To Makiko, who had never been a fan of reading, I’m sure it looked like I had tons of books, but I really didn’t. If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.

Breasts and Eggs: 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 | TIME Breasts and Eggs: 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 | TIME

She worked in Shobashi, the neighborhood the three of us worked in for years after we ran off that night and started our new life with Komi. There was absolutely nothing glamorous about Shobashi. Just rows of tired buildings, crooked and brown with age. You only know what it means to be poor, or have the right to talk about it, if you’ve been there yourself. Maybe you’re poor now. Maybe you were poor in the past. I’m both. I was born poor, and I’m still poor. I don’t know. It has to be somebody’s. My room’s on the second floor. See that window? Upstairs and on the left. She reminded me of Mum. I couldn’t tell if it was just in the way that daughters start to look like their mothers over time, or if the things that happened to Mum’s body were happening to her now, too. I can’t tell you how many times I almost asked her, Hey, how are you feeling? Are you doing okay? but I always held off, not wanting to make her any more self-conscious. The weird part was, she had a ton of energy. She was used to her dynamic with Midoriko and talked to her like everything was okay, one-sided as it was. She gabbed away, so upbeat that it almost got to me.I wonder what it feels like. I hear it hurts pretty bad, but that’s not even the worst part. Once it starts, it keeps happening, for decades. How does that ever feel normal? I know Jun got hers. She told me. But it’s weird how everyone knows I haven’t. I mean, it’s not like everyone goes around telling people when it happens. It’s not like everyone waves around their little kits for all to see when they go to the bathroom. How can everyone just tell like that? I still don’t really know why Makiko and her husband separated. I remember having lots of conversations with Makiko about her ex and whether they should get divorced, and I remember it was bad, but now I can’t remember how it happened. Makiko’s ex came from Tokyo, where he grew up. He moved to Osaka for work. They hadn’t been together very long when Makiko got pregnant. One thing I kind of remember is the way he called Makiko baby. Nobody talked like that in Osaka. They only said that in the movies.

Breasts and Eggs Quotes by Mieko Kawakami - Goodreads Breasts and Eggs Quotes by Mieko Kawakami - Goodreads

For poor people, window size isn’t even a concept. Nobody has a view. A window is just a blurry pane of glass hidden behind cramped plywood shelves. Who knows if the thing even opens. It’s a greasy rectangle by the broken extractor fan that your family’s never used and never will. Wooooowwwww this book talking about women and also written by women sooo goooodddddd. Im gona give the hints: Today in health class we talked about menarche. So basically, your first period. Pretty much everyone else has already had theirs, but that’s what we talked about, how it works and what’s happening in your body that makes you bleed. Then they told us about pads and showed us what the womb looks like. Lately, when other girls go to the bathroom, the ones who have had their period cling together and talk about things only they understand. Like they know the rest of us are listening and want for us to hear them. There must be plenty of girls who haven’t had their period yet, but I feel like I’m the only one left. Thirty-year-old Natsu lives in Tokyo, having moved from Osaka to pursue her dream to be a writer, when her sister Makiko and young niece Midoriko come to visit. But this isn’t a typical family reunion—in Mieko Kawakami’s novel, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, Makiko is in town to find a clinic for a breast enhancement procedure and, for reasons she can’t quite understand, her daughter has recently stopped speaking to her. In Midoriko’s silence, the women become attuned to their own fears related to growing older and their changing bodies. It’s a sharply observed and heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a woman, in Japan and beyond. The second half of the novel finds the characters still grappling with these struggles 10 years later. In describing Natsu’s life as a childless woman at odds with an identity she did not anticipate, the novel highlights the anxieties that accompany contemporary womanhood in aching and wonderfully absurd terms. Yeah. Pen and paper. Not talking. I mean, I still talk, but Midoriko writes me her responses. It’s been like that for maybe a month now.My first visit to Tokyo Station was ten years earlier, the summer I turned twenty. It was a day like today, when you can never wipe off all the sweat. On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by her daughter, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsuko’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another.

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett | Waterstones

She pointed her jaw at the wall, where a pair of Chanel scarves hung like posters, under perspex, lit up in a yellow spotlight. As far as I knew, this was Makiko’s third time in Tokyo. Overstimulated, she kept on saying stuff like Look at all the people, or This place is huge, or All the girls here have the tiniest faces. When she almost ran somebody over, she apologized, Sorry, sorry, sorry, way too loud. I was preoccupied with making sure Midoriko was still behind us, and I engaged with Makiko just enough to sound like I was listening—but the thing that really got me was her face.

Everyone looks older as the years go by, but that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t even forty, but if she told you I just turned fifty-three, you’d wish her happy birthday. She didn’t look older. She literally looked old. I had no idea why. One day, Makiko said something to her, and she didn’t answer. That was it. At first she thought Midoriko was depressed, but that didn’t seem to be the case. She had a healthy appetite, went to school, and talked like normal with her friends and teachers. Just not with her mum. It didn’t seem like anything else was wrong. She just refused to talk at home. On purpose. Makiko had tried to figure out what was going on, treading carefully, but it was no use. Midoriko wouldn’t give her any hints. We can stay tonight and tomorrow, but we’ve got to leave the day after that, so I can get to work that night. This kid was way too skinny. Her dark skin made the patches of psoriasis even harder to overlook. Gray shorts, legs as skinny as the arms poking from her turquoise tank top. Her lips were tight and her shoulders were stiff—she reminded me of myself as a kid. That got me thinking about what it means to be poor.