She has won a tribute from Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most famous novelist like a tree that can be counted on to reach for the sky or a river to flow towards the sea, he said, Kawakami “is always ceaselessly growing and evolving”. Heaven, from 2009, will be published in English in 2021, followed by All The Lovers In The Night (from 2013) in 2022. Kawakami has since scooped up prizes for fiction, poetry and short stories in Japan, and foreign readers are about to discover what all the fuss is about, with more than a dozen translations of Breasts and Eggs in the works. Criticism from one of the grandees of conservative Japanese politics didn’t stop the novel selling 250,000 copies. What are women’s options once they become mothers? What makes them want kids anyway? Why are they chained to unreasonable expectations of their bodies? Traditionalists naturally despised it Shintaro Ishihara, then Tokyo’s governor and himself a former novelist, called it “unpleasant and intolerable”. The novel dropped like a bomb on the heavily male world of Japanese fiction, smuggling weighty questions into its breezy, discursive style. What are women’s options once they become mothers? Why are they chained to unreasonable expectations of their bodies? Maybe breast implants would give her the “kind of body that you see in girly magazines”. As younger women begin displacing Makiko in a workplace hierarchy determined by male desire, she begins to obsess over her nipples and sagging boobs.
At its centre is Makiko, an ageing bar hostess and single mother to Midoriko, her reproachful adolescent daughter, who will only communicate with her in writing. Breasts and Eggs, originally written as a blog in the punchy dialect of her native Osaka, yanked working-class women off the literary sidelines, published in 2008.
Kawakami has made her name articulating womanhood in Japan better than any living author. “Did the virus wipe out all the women? How could they know anything about what it is like to be a mother? They don’t even understand there’s a problem.”
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