Breasts and Eggs
Mieko Kawakami · 2020
A Tokyo bar worker and her sister confront questions of the female body, reproductive choice, and working-class life with Kawakami's characteristic combination of realism and philosophical seriousness. Her most ambitious novel and one of the decade's best Japanese translations.
The case against
Two books wear one cover. Book One reworks Kawakami's prizewinning 2008 novella; Book Two, written a decade later and twice as long, slows to the pace of its endless conversations, in which characters hand one another position papers on antinatalism and donor conception. The seam shows. And the Osaka dialect that gave the original its bite arrives in English flattened to standard prose.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
