Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller and Jeena Yi

The story of three women by a writer hailed by Haruki Murakami as Japan's most important contemporary novelist. Challenging every preconception about storytelling and prose style, mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, Kawakami is today one of Japan's most important and bestselling writers. She exploded onto the cultural scene first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and is now an award-winning novelist. Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko's daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Her silence proves a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and frustrations. On another hot summer's day ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless. "Breasts and Eggs is so amazing it took my breath away." "Breasts and Eggs may take some adjusting to as a reading experience. It presents a unique vision of Japan-its sounds, its absurdities, its pain-that simply isn't found in much writing available in English. Yet this speaks precisely to its value. Kawakami believes her novel holds universal appeal." "Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body-its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions. And she is especially good at capturing its longings, those in this novel being at once obsessive and inchoate, and in one way or another about transformation." "A novel about women figuring out how they want to be women." "Kawakami deftly, deeply questions the assumptions of womanhood and family-the bonds and abuses, expectations and betrayals, choices and denials." "The novel is gratifyingly artless, delivered in a frank and funny prose that shines with unselfconsciousness and a kind of flat-footed grace…The novel speaks to the stories of Lucia Berlin; there is the same sense of a dispassionate but honoring gaze cast on working-class women, dogged and unsentimental in their survival."

Mode of access: World Wide Web