Source of book: Audiobook from the library
Somehow it has worked out that the last four books I have finished have all been in translation, each from a different language.
This book has been on my list since it came out, and happened to come up as available as an audiobook.
Before getting into the book itself, I want to mention that the book as we have it in English is actually two books. Kawakami originally wrote the first part as Breasts and Eggs, then, after this book was a success, re-wrote the original and added a sequel to it, which is the second part of this book.
I mention this in part because the two books are very much separate, with their own narrative arcs and central themes and ideas. They contain the same three core characters, and are told from the same perspective.
The other reason I mention this is that the second book is good, but it isn’t as good as the first book, which is a true gem. Again, standing alone, the second book is a good read, and I would recommend it on its own. But that first book is so incredible that it makes the second book feel a bit pale in comparison.
I will also note that, with one exception, men do not come off well in this book. Most of the men are horrible. If they are not outright violent and evil, they are gross. If they are not gross, then they are at least clueless and casually cruel in what they say. In other words, entitled males in a patriarchal society that values them above women.
That said, the one exception to the rule (who only appears in the second book), is a really great and nuanced character, and his particular arc in the story is one of the most compelling subplots in the book.
I am going to try to walk a fine line between giving away too many spoilers and having enough material for discussion. Fortunately, this book isn’t driven primarily by plot, but by characterization and social and psychological analysis.
Book 1
This book really contains just three characters - there are other characters who appear via flashbacks or as mentioned by the main characters, but only the three main characters speak.
Natsuko, aka Natsu, is the narrator, and both books are told from her perspective. She is the younger sister of Makiko, who is the single mother of Midoriko, a 12 year old girl going through puberty.
The entire book takes place over the course of a few days, when Makiko and Midoriko visit Natsu in Tokyo.
Natsu and Makiko were raised by their mother and grandmother after their violent, drunk, and unemployed father abandoned the family. Both girls lied to get employment when they were underaged, after both their mother and grandmother died of cancer.
Makiko ended up as a single mother herself, and has had a hard life of it. She works multiple jobs, including as a hostess at a bar, where she is expected to flirt with the patrons.
Natsu lives in poverty as well, deliberately working a minimum wage job at a bookstore while she attempts to establish a career as a writer. She sends a bit of money to her older sister when she can.
The visit is a social one, but also turns out to be part of Makiko’s project of getting breast implants. How much of this is driven by Makiko’s body image issues and how much is driven by the fact that she is an aging woman in an industry where nubile youth is preferred isn’t clear.
In any case, Midoriko has flipped out over her mother’s quest, and has stopped talking. She communicates only by writing.
The book alternates between the main story, told by Natsu, and excerpts from Midoriko’s diary where, among other things, she comments on the events of the day, and expresses her fears and frustration with puberty and the reproductive system generally.
I won’t mention the entire plot, but this book contains a day at an amusement park shared by Natsu and Midoriko, discussions of the sexual and economic politics of the bar, flashbacks to Natsu and Makiko’s youth, and plenty of non-preachy analysis of gender-based hierarchies and expectations in patriarchal Japanese society.
The final scene in this book is some of the most amazing writing and storytelling I have read. It involves Midoriko cracking an entire dozen raw eggs over her head - I can’t even describe it without all that comes before, but I will note that this is a brilliant use of “Chekhov’s Gun.” Eggs are mentioned early, but it still comes as a shock when they are cracked.
As I noted, this part of the story is tight and focused, and superbly told. The characters are believable, and the insights into Midoriko’s psyche and fears and her feeling that her existence has ruined her mother’s life reverberate throughout the story.
Part 2
For this part, we fast forward 9 or so years. While it isn’t actually stated, I think we can assume that the traumatic denouement of the last book has led to Makiko abandoning her quest for boobs.
Makiko continues to work at the bar - she is now the de-facto manager, although she doesn’t get paid more for this. Midoriko is thriving, completing her education and enjoying the company of a young man who seems to be a good guy. (He never really appears in the story, so we have to take the author’s word for it.)
Natsu has found modest success, with her collection of short stories about death and what comes after selling enough for her to be asked to write a longer novel.
But, as Natsu approaches 40, she craves a connection. With a child.
This part of the book explores assistive reproduction, intentional single parenting, and a whole host of ethical issues surrounding that.
We start off with understanding that Natsu had a brief relationship with a childhood friend as a young adult, but that relationship ended because Natsu experiences physical and psychological pain during sex. She realizes that she has no sexual desire, and her body does not respond to it.
Her boyfriend, understandably, eventually marries someone else and has children.
Since then, Natsu hasn’t desired a romantic relationship with anyone. However, particularly after an evening with the young daughter of a fellow novelist, she realizes that she would like to meet her future child.
How to accomplish this? Well, that’s…complicated.
The author takes us on a tour of the landscape of assistive reproduction in Japan, where single women have few options.
Legitimate sperm banks only serve married couples. Foreign banks are choosy and expensive.
Individual donors advertise their services. But the guys who do this are creepy at best. Onda may be neurodivergent (I would guess he is), but he is also arrogant, entitled, and disgusting. No wonder Natsu flees.
But the author also explores the flip side of the issue: the children conceived by donation.
The one truly lovely male character in the book is Jun Aizawa, a man who discovers that he was the result of a sperm donation at age 30, in a pretty traumatic manner. The man who raised him has died of a heart attack, and his vindictive and nasty paternal grandmother disowns him.
Aizawa is a doctor, and also works with a support organization for children conceived by donation. He and Natsu end up spending quite a bit of time in the book discussing the ethics of donation and the effects on children.
For Aizawa, the biggest issue is the secrecy and the lies told to protect that secrecy. As he eventually understands near the end of the book, his desire to meet his biological father is really just a displacement of his grief that he was never able to tell the man who raised him that biology was unimportant compared to the love that they had for each other.
I tend to agree with this, by the way. Ultimately, “father” is what you do, not your biological relationship. I’m not discounting those who wish to meet their sperm donor. But as a father myself, it is what you do that counts. And I would consider a non-biological child to be mine.
Another child of artificial conception in the book is Yuriko, who has endured unbelievable evil. Her non-biological father, unlike Aizawa’s dad, was not kind to her. He prostituted her out as a child, after raping her himself.
It is understandable, therefore, that Yuriko is anti-natalist. She believes it is immoral to conceive a child, because the child did not ask to be born. Even if most children have good lives, why take the chance that it won’t?
By the way, this is a question that matters a lot when it comes to the religious tradition I was raised in. It is one thing to have a finite life that is full of pain. It is another to be tortured for eternity by one’s creator. Why bring a child into the world if there is a chance it will suffer in hell?
(This is one reason I stopped believing in hell in Jr. High. The whole idea was morally appalling.)
Honestly, though, Yuriko makes a pretty solid argument. It isn’t irrefutable exactly, but it is consistent and thoughtful.
And, for myself, as much as I am glad to have been born and glad to have my children, I have wondered if I would have had children had I foreseen Trump and the rise of fascism in our country. Was that a future I would have intentionally brought children into?
(Related: this is why I burn with a cold fury at people who put him in office. They chose to destroy our country and harm my children’s future, mostly because they were so fucking racist. They had better be praying that hell doesn’t exist.)
Yuriko herself, however, does admit that most people are glad they were born, even if she isn’t.
Along with this journey that Natsu takes, determining if and how she wants to be a parent, there are other side plots. Natsu finds a conflict between her desire for parenthood and her devotion to the craft of writing. And yet, they are connected. Her impasse regarding having a child has led to writer’s block.
Her editor, Sengawa, is happy being childless and unattached. And also thinks that Natsu would be distracted from writing by having a child.
Makiko has found a way to enjoy her daughter, but acknowledges that her life is harder with Midoriko to support as well.
Natsu’s married friend Rie is unhappy in her marriage, and finds she is ambivalent about her daughter.
It’s all very complicated, this question of parenthood.
One of the strongest ideas in the book - one that Natsu and Yuriko both assert - is that the ethical questions surrounding bringing a child into the world do not merely apply to those who use sperm donation or other assistive technologies. There is nothing magic about creating children through sexual intercourse that eliminates those ethical questions.
From my experience working with families in my professional capacity, I can say with confidence that there are a LOT of married heterosexual couples who have no business making children. And plenty of single men and women who have made excellent parents - often stepping in when the biological parents cannot care for their kids. And certainly plenty of gay and lesbian couples I know are great parents.
Again, there is nothing magical about being a married heterosexual couple having sex. It doesn’t make you a good parent. And being otherwise doesn’t make you a bad parent.
This is, unfortunately, something I have had to come to terms with in my own life. My mentally ill mother had no business having children. The evidence of this continues to cause trauma in my birth family as she lashes out at her sons and their families because we have failed to turn out to be what she expected. We are too human, too individual, too committed to living our own lives, not hers. I resemble her father (in her mind, not real life - we are very different), and yet haven’t fixed her daddy issues.
There is always the “what if” - what if she had delayed marriage (she married at 19) and gotten the mental health care she needed before having kids? Maybe she would have been able to love us as individual humans, not be disappointed that we weren’t like what she wanted and expected. Maybe she wouldn’t have self-medicated with toxic fundamentalist religion. Maybe she wouldn’t have projected her childhood trauma onto me and become enmeshed with my sister. What if?
This is at the heart of what Yuriko claims: that parents have children for selfish reasons. We have children for us, not for the children, who do not choose to be born.
By the way, I do not think Yuriko’s argument is the author’s position. After all, she got married and had a kid - and remains married to the father. But, I think that she had to explore this sense of ambivalence, and the question of whether making children is an inherently selfish act. Because it kind of is. And I say that as someone who loves his kids and is incredibly proud of them and is determined to see them as humans valuable for themselves, not as a reflection of me.
So, as I said, this part of the book is good, but it does have some flaws. The biggest one is that it can get bogged down in the philosophy sometimes. I’m not exactly sure what (if anything) should have been cut, but there are times when it feels like the book has wandered away from the story itself and gone down a more abstract exploration of patriarchal culture.
Another thing I thought was a shame is that Midoriko is barely in the second part. And when she is, there is so little time that we don’t see her personality like we did in the first part. Really, Midoriko was the best part of that first book, and a really great character. I felt like she could have been more involved. For example, Natsu talks to everyone else about her plans to conceive a child. Why not talk to Midoriko, who, in my opinion, might have had the most interesting stuff to say about it. After all, she had that existential meltdown in the first book, right?
Finally, the ending is a bit abrupt, and leaves a lot unanswered. Not in terms of loose ends in the plot - the whole book is well plotted. But in terms of the philosophy. If Natsu is going to be a mother, shouldn’t we get to see how this plays out for her? Maybe there will be a sequel, and we can find out.
After all, a parenting experience doesn’t end at birth. It is just beginning, and how a person adapts to the child they actually have, who will be very different from the child they expect, is the biggest question facing every parent. I believe this, more than any other factor, will ultimately determine if a parent will have a good adult relationship with their child.
I could talk about a lot more in this book, from patriarchal culture to asexuality. As with a few other female Japanese authors I have read in the last few years, asexual characters are becoming more common in fiction. Even as a definite allosexual myself, I find stories where romance is not the primary driving force to be interesting and compelling as well. Nothing wrong with romance, of course - I read those books too. But not all stories need revolve around romance.
The English version as translated by David Boyd and Sam Bett. My understanding is that they split the labor between narration and dialogue. I am not qualified to comment on the translation, as I cannot read the original. Maybe my second kid, who can read at a third grade level, will read it in Japanese someday and comment on it for me. We’ll see. Anyway, unlike some books where the style is unique enough, this one seems a bit more bland in the translation. For whatever that is worth.
The audiobook was narrated by Emily Woo Zeller and Jeena Yi. I am pretty sure one did the bulk of the narration, while the other did Midoriko’s diary, but I am not sure which is which. In any case, the voices were fairly easy to follow, with each character having a unique one. It’s a good audiobook.
