Month: May 2020

夏物語、 川上 未映子、文藝春秋、 2019

Summer Story, Mieko Kawakami, Bungeishunju, 2019

[Since I first read this book, an English translation has been published by Europa Press as Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd.]

You need to just let yourself go along for the ride with this book. If you get hung up on how fast the “plot” is moving or a lack of “development” (aspects that some reviews have complained about), you will miss so many pleasures in this book. An impatient reader could miss the quirky details that Kawakami adds and jump past the poignant moments when Natsuko, the main character, looks back on her life. These memories are sprinkled throughout the book, so for me the point of the book was not whether Natsuko decides to have a baby or not (which, if you read the book’s summary, is apparently what the book is about), but the picture Kawakami creates throughout of an entire life, a family, and even a small community in a down-and-out area in Osaka.

Kawakami gives us one of the most important details about Natsuko at the beginning of this long novel, when she tells us that Natsuko moved from Osaka to Tokyo in 1998 carrying a large and “ridiculously durable” backpack she’d bought in a used clothing store. It was stuffed with about 10 books by her favorite authors that she couldn’t bear to entrust to the movers because they are her talismans. Knowing that about Natsuko, I was happy to spend the next 543 pages in her company.

Part 1 of this book is a retelling of Kawakami’s Akutagawa-winning “Breast and Eggs,” a story of a few days in the hot summer when Natsuko’s sister Maki and niece Midoriko visit her in Tokyo, where Natsuko is working part-time as she tries to write a novel. Maki has been researching breast augmentation surgery for months now and she plans to visit clinics during this trip. Meanwhile, Midoriko is no longer talking to her mother and records her confused feelings about puberty in a diary. We go back and forth between Midoriko’s journal entries and Maki’s explanations—in rapid-fire Osaka dialect—of the pros and cons of various types of breast augmentation, all interspersed with Natsuko’s recollections of growing up in Osaka.

Natsuko grew up desperately poor with her mother, Grandma Komi and sister Maki in Osaka. Although there wasn’t always enough food and she had to lie about her age so she could start working early, her memories of this family life are happy. And her desire to write novels is somehow tied to her childhood memories: remembering how she learned multiplication with her grandmother, making dumplings when they ran out of rice and laughing over nothing, the summer days when she accompanied her grandmother as she cleaned buildings, newsprint blurred by the watermelon seeds they spit onto it, the smell of the shampoo samples they packed in baggies for extra money, the anxiety when her mother was late coming home and the relief when she finally arrived, all smiles in her factory uniform.

This wasn’t really an environment that left much time for reading, but Natsuko started reading obsessively when she got what seems to have been a bladder infection, and reading was the only thing that distracted her from the discomfort. Noticing her habit, a customer at the bar where she works brought her a bag stuffed with paperback books. In one of Kawakami’s vivid turns of phrase, she describes the stuffed tote bag as looking like a box made of paulownia wood carried home from a funeral by the grieving family. Natsuko still has many of these old paperbacks, each calling up the past for her.

Both in her childhood and now, Natsuko’s world seems to be populated nearly entirely by women: her mother and Grandma Komi (although they have both died, they are still present for her), the women who work at the bar, and the women she observes in her neighborhood. Men are at best negligible presences, and at worst, malignant figures. She makes a neighborhood sento (public bath house) come alive, noting the babies crying as they are dried, toddlers running around unsteadily, the sound of the television mixed with the hum of hair driers, the bright sound of the old lady greeting people at the front desk, the laughter of bent-over old ladies, women sitting stark naked in rattan chairs as they chatted. Kawakami draws a picture full of women’s vitality and energy.

A sento in Osaka; Source: iiofuro.com

Women are still at the center of Natsuko’s life in Part 2, which covers the period from 2016 to 2019. By this point Natsuko has achieved some degree of success as a writer, and is struggling with her second novel. She is now trying to figure out what to do about her desire to have a baby, although she has no partner or any interest in one. As well as her sister and niece, her editor, Ryoko Sengawa, and another author, Rika Yusa, are important presences.

Rika was particularly fun to read about. A popular novelist, she had arrived at the press conference after winning the Naoki prize with a shaved head, carrying her baby. When a reporter asked her if she was making some kind of statement about women’s rights by bringing her baby along, she said she had no choice because she’s a single mother and no one else was around to take care of her. Rika was briefly married to a man who quoted Virginia Woolf and talked about his respect for women, and yet never cleaned the house or went grocery shopping. She is now much happier living alone with her daughter. She feels she was born just to have Kura, her whole life leading up to the moment of her birth. In contrast, Natsuko’s editor is horrified that Natsuko would even consider having a baby as it would interfere with her writing. Natsuko makes a decision for herself by the end of the book, but Kawakami gives a voice to many perspectives in this book, including that of people who were born from sperm donors.

I’ll close with another description of Natsuko’s memories of childhood visits to sento that, for me, shows the way Kawakami captures something so essential in this book:

Way back when, although it didn’t feel so long ago, we used to visit the bathhouse all the time. But did we? I mean when Komi and mom were alive, and Makiko and me were little. We loaded our washbowls with our shampoo, soap, and towels and laughed our way through the night. Water so piping hot it made our cheeks red. We had no money. We had nothing. But we had each other. We had our words, and all the feelings that we never even thought of putting into words. There were always women in the space beyond the steamy air. Babies, girls, and older women. Naked as they sudsed up their hair, sank into the water, heated their bodies. Countless wrinkles, straight backs, sagging breasts, gleaming skin. Stubby little arms and legs, age spots dark and light, articulated shoulder blades—bodies laughed and chattered about the silliest things, airing their frustrations or bottling them up but most importantly surviving, day by day. Where had all those women gone? What had happened to their bodies? Maybe all of them were gone by now. Like Mom and Komi.

[quoted from Sam Bett and David Boyd’s translation in Breasts and Eggs]

Chidori Onsen in Osaka; Source: maimai kyoto

I highly recommend listening to Kawakami talk to Robert Campbell, a professor of Japanese literature at University of Tokyo, about her book on the podcast 人生に、文学を. She gives several readings from the book as well.