Breasts and Eggs

'What a Catherine wheel of talent she is, how unplaceable and unique.' John Freeman, Lit Hub

'Kawakami lobbed a literary grenade into the fusty, male-dominated world of Japanese fiction' The Economist

On a hot summer's day in a poor suburb of Tokyo, two sisters are reunited when the elder, Makiko, travels to the city in search of breast-enhancement surgery accompanied by her sullen and silent teenage daughter, Midoriko. Over the course of their trip, Natsu's small flat becomes a pressure cooker around them. All three are in the grips of their own battles, with the bodies that betray them year by year, with the way their class constrains them, and yet each also fears that one of the other women will be the thing to truly drag them under. 

Ten years later, we meet Natsu again. Now a writer, she finds herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer as she faces her own uncertain future. 

In Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami paints a radical, unflinching and intimate portrait of womanhood and class in contemporary Japan. This is an unforgettable debut from a major new international talent.

'I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Breasts and Eggs' Haruki Murakami

'One of Japan's brightest stars is set to explode across the global skies of literature' Japan Times