Breasts, eggs, words: the female body according to Kawakami

Natsuko straightens her shoulders, lifts her chin, and arches her back. Then she twists her torso to the right and left. Apart from her head and feet, almost everything is visible in the mirror: her breasts, abdomen, vulva.

This image, taken from Breasts and Eggs by the Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, is no accident: it immediately introduces the female body as a field of tensions, questions, desires, and pains. The narrative thread of the novel is not only chronological—divided into two parts separated by eight years—but also develops along a symbolic and bodily axis. Three narrative cores can be distinguished, each associated with a part of the body and a character: the breasts, the uterus, the ovaries. Makiko, the protagonist’s sister, wants to undergo breast surgery to restore the shape and size she had before pregnancy. She also wants to lighten her nipples to conform to an internalized aesthetic ideal. Her daughter Midoriko perceives all this as an attempt to erase motherhood, to rewrite the body as if her birth had never happened. In response, she retreats into selective mutism and entrusts her reflections on menstruation to a diary, which for her is a reality difficult to inhabit.

Meanwhile, Natsuko—the narrator—confronts another fracture: her lack of sexual desire, which has led to the end of her relationship with the man she loves, and her desire to become a mother alone. Her body is fertile, but her heart hesitates: can she really choose to have a child without desire? Without a man?

Although some reflections might seem extreme to Western readers, the strength of Breasts and Eggs lies precisely in its ability to show how every woman inhabits her body differently and how no universal model or grammar of the feminine exists.

In particular, the narrative of motherhood departs from any rhetoric. Although those close to Natsuko remind her that “no one comes into the world on their own initiative” and that desiring a child alone might seem selfish, she experiences motherhood as an act of connection. In her mind, the child already exists: a concrete presence even though not yet conceived. “Can I go on without meeting my child?” she entrusts to a poem written impulsively and then forgotten. It’s impossible not to think of Letter to a Child Never Born by Oriana Fallaci, where the protagonist imagines a dialogue with the life she carries inside herself. But while Fallaci writes from wound and fear, Kawakami chooses desire as the driving force for creation. “If I can choose the way to become a mother, then I can choose who I am”: this statement by Natsuko is the ethical and political heart of the novel. It recalls another literary figure who had the courage to affirm herself against fate: the protagonist of A Woman by Sibilla Aleramo. In the 1906 autobiographical novel, Aleramo decides to leave a violent husband and, to do so, also renounces her child. A painful gesture, but one born from the same need as Natsuko’s: before being a mother, a woman must be a person.

The freedom that Aleramo claims through abandonment, Natsuko conquers through choice. Both reject a traditional, unchosen idea of motherhood. Both pay a price. Both remind us that mothers are not born: they become—or choose not to become—through a journey that passes through the body.