Breasts and Eggs cover art

Breasts and Eggs

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Thousands of incredible audiobooks and podcasts to take wherever you go.
Immerse yourself in a world of storytelling with the Plus Catalogue - unlimited listening to thousands of select audiobooks, podcasts and Audible Originals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Breasts and Eggs

By: Mieko Kawakami
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Buy Now for £17.99

Buy Now for £17.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: 30-year-old Natsu, 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 Midoriko, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsu’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another.

Ten years later, we meet Natsu again. She is now a writer and finds herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer and her family’s past as she faces her own uncertain future.

In Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working-class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them. This is an unforgettable full-length English-language debut from a major new international talent.

©2020 Mieko Kawakami (P)2020 W F Howes Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Women's Fiction Summer Heartfelt Thought-Provoking

Listeners also enjoyed...

 There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job cover art
A Nail Through The Heart cover art
Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop cover art
The Magic of Found Objects cover art
My Brilliant Friend cover art
Anna Karenina cover art
Terminal Boredom cover art
Who's Loving You cover art
The Complete Jaipur Trilogy cover art

Critic reviews

"Breathtaking." (Haruki Murakami, international best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
All stars
Most relevant  
This book gives a window into poverty in Japan. It follows a family and their challenges and specifically depicts the challenges of motherhood, child raising and fertility. It is also written and read in a unique way that allows the reader to feel a sense of access to Japanese culture.

A less affluent, real view of life in Japan following generational changes

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I love how this book takes you on a journey to view life through the perspective of women of different age groups. It’s about a growing girl, her aunt, her mother, her mother’s mother, the choice whether or not to birth a child, and so much more. Now at the end, I realise how in understanding these characters, this book ultimately helps you understand yourself better. I’d rate it higher if I could.

An Incredible Read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
one of the better books i've encountered so far from Japanese writers, a complex story about culture, personal desire, priorities and interpersonal relationships, quite heartbreaking. my second favourite book from this author.
written as a parallel between a mother desperately wanting breast implants, partially ignoring her "outcast" daughter, and a woman who does not wish to have intercourse but is looking to have a child, this book comes in force to be very critical of a lot of superficiality present in female culture, all over the world, but focusing a lot on Japanese culture. on its way, it touches on other issues like misogyny, the healthcare system and access to fertility treatments, codependency, broken relationships, female friendships, apathy, challenges of being a writer, independence and standing up against the norm, and a lot of other things, more or less easy to miss, some of them being potentially a bit too well hidden. as a negative, i thought the pace was slightly sluggish, but the content manages to pull it up significantly.
a cryptic book, with a bit of a sluggish pace, and a lot of things in it, but one relevant for the western world, not just Japanese society.

good book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a fascinating read. It explores the role of women in Japanese society and bodily autonomy, and has some really thought provoking (or disturbing, depending on your anxiety levels) reflections on life and death and the ethics of having children. The writing is excellent and really brings the characters to life. Some of it is (in the second part of especially) is darkly funny, excruciatingly so at points. I found it a little over long and slow paced but I think that's because I listened to the audiobook, I think it may be better to read in print.

Fascinating read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I think this audiobook’s narration is what really worked - I was completely engaged by the main reader, and having multiple narrators made the dialogue really enjoyable.

It’s interesting hearing Japanese phrasing and speech style translated into English, I think it might come across as meandering, dramatic or overly self-deprecating sometimes to a western reader, but I believe this is more of a cultural difference and I really enjoyed how it was translated.

It was a great backdrop, and for people who’ve spent time in Osaka (Minato ward/港区 for example) or Tokyo (around Sangenjaya/三軒茶屋) it’s interesting to hear about local sights and history.

I think this book provided a great look into Japanese society when it comes to family, women and children, and an insight into social issues in Japan such as women’s rights and the falling birth rate.

Excellent Narration!!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It was a gripping story! Beautifully narrated! Loved all topics used! Loved the accent of the narrator and her pronunciation of the Japanese words!

Life

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
took me a while to get into this but really enjoyed how it covered topics of fertility, physical appearance and growing up. I found the narrator easy to listen to

really enjoyed

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Every word is crafted and draws you in. Perfect narration.
I was compelled to write a review this book, to express to others how moving it is. Very feminine, feminist, modern and educated but not at the expense of the traditional. The characters are well rounded and real. The narrators expertly bring them to life so you believe their struggles and fears.

Utterly Beautiful book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Natsu was a puzzle at the start and remained so at the end! I couldn't find a reason why she was as she was or stayed so. The relationship with Aizawa was "resolved" in massive leap before the rushed ending, which came as a surprise given the minute detail with which the two books of the novel had been described. Why had we been put through all of that, then? What relevance was book one to book two beyond being two periods in this very odd (actually, just clinically depressed) woman's life?
This book was a real head-scratcher for me. I like Emily Woo Zeller's voice, but why was every sentence spoken like a dramatic statement with almost no performance? It was a little odd.
Still, I didn't NOT enjoy it though, and it made a nice change for me to read literature set in modern working class.

Loved the prose, but...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
CN. Child Abuse

I feel like broken record atm, but I've genuinely never read anything like it and I loved it. I feel like it has changed or unlocked something in me as a reader, especially one with ADHD, to appreciate a different kind of novel. Really hard to put my finger on it, but there was just something magical about how everything and nothing it all was.

I am going to need some time to digest and process this, but I absolutely adored it.

Unlike Anything Else

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews