Breasts
and Eggs
'Women
are no longer content to shut up'
Mieko
Kawakami
"the
dominant view today is that women have always been to some degree oppressed—the
usual term is "dominated"—by men because men are stronger, they are
responsible for fighting, and it is in their nature to be more aggressive.
Common among those who discuss sex roles are blunt judgments, empirically
phrased, that casually relegate to the wastebasket of history".
F
Engels
Reading
Mieko Kawakami's novel Breasts and Eggs, one concludes that it is not easy
being a working-class woman in any country at the moment. Described as a Feminist,
Kawakami seems more interested in describing the human condition rather than
being saddled with this unsatisfactory label.
Her
opposition to being called a Feminist writer has not stopped numerous people from
labelling her so and a fighter against male domination. While God forbid that
she stops writing the way she does, it would improve her writing if she imbued
her characters with a little historical perspective. After all, men's
relationship with women has been around for a long time and is a complex issue.
While she would be met with hails of derision from her Feminist readers, she
could do no worse than consult Friedrich Engel's extraordinary book The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Engels
writes eloquently, "the dominant view today is that women have always been
to some degree oppressed—the usual term is "dominated"—by men,
because men are stronger, they are responsible for fighting, and it is in their
nature to be more aggressive. Common among those who discuss sex roles are
blunt judgments, empirically phrased, that casually relegate to the wastebasket
of history the profound questions about women's status that were raised by
nineteenth-century writers. "It is common sociological truth that in all
societies authority is held by men, not women," writes Beidelman; "At
both primitive and advanced levels, men regularly tend to dominate women,"
states Goldschmidt; "Men have always been politically and economically
dominant over women," reports Harris. Some women join in. Women's work is
always "private," while "roles within the public sphere are the
province of men," writes Hammond and Jablow. Therefore "women can
exert influence outside the family only indirectly through their influence on
their kinsmen".
The
first problem with such statements is their lack of historical perspective. To
generalise from cross-cultural data gathered almost wholly in the twentieth
century is to ignore changes that have been taking place for anywhere up to
five hundred years as a result of involvement, first with European
mercantilism, then with full-scale colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, there
is almost a kind of racism involved, an assumption that the cultures of Third
World peoples have virtually stood still until destroyed by the recent
mushrooming of urban industrialism. Certainly, one of the most consistent and
widely documented changes during the colonial period was a decline in the
status of women relative to men. The causes were partly indirect, as the
introduction of wage labour for men, and the trade of basic commodities,
speeded up processes whereby tribal collectives were breaking up into
individual family units, in which women and children were becoming economically
dependent on single men. The process was aided by the formal allocation to men
of whatever public authority and legal right of ownership was allowed in
colonial situations, by missionary teachings, and by the persistence of Europeans
in dealing with men as the holders of all formal authority. The second problem
with statements like the above is largely a theoretical one. The common use of
some polar dimension to assess woman's position and to find that everywhere men
are "dominant" and hold authority over women not only ignores the World's
history but transmutes the totality of tribal decision-making structures (as we
try to reconstruct them) into the power terms of our society.[1]
 |
| Mieko Kawakami |
While
it is perhaps unusual for two people to translate a book, it is beautifully done
by Sam Bett and David Boyd. However, they have faced criticism for moving away
from the essence of Kawakami's use of the Osaka dialect, Which reinforces the
working class nature of her characters. The dispute over their translation is
above my pay grade, so I will leave it to others to argue the merit.
Madeleine
Thien writes in her review, "the real Osaka dialect is not even about
communicating. It is a contest. How can I put it? It's an art" –
translators Bett and Boyd do not render it. In 2012, an excerpt of Breasts and
Eggs was published by another translator, Louise Heal Kawai, who offers
Makiko's "I've been thinking about getting breast implants" as
"Natsuko, I am thinking of getting me boobs done". Kawai compares the
Osaka dialect to Mancunian: rough, friendly, outspoken. In Bett and Boyd's
translation, Kawakami's feminism is vivid, but the language occasionally feels
placid; meanwhile, in Kawai's translation, feminism and language collide in a
way that feels deliciously irreverent. Here is Brett and Boyd, translating
Midoriko's response to her mother's desire for surgery: "It's gross, I
really don't understand. It's so, so, so, so, so, so gross … She's being an
idiot, the biggest idiot." Here is Kawai: "I don't get it. PUKE PUKE
PUKE PUKE PUKE! … She's off her trolley, my Mum, daft, barmy, bonkers, thick as
two short planks."[2]
To
what extent this is an autobiographical piece will be known only to some extent
by the author. Maybe women will have a closer bond with the characters in the
book, but as a man, the plight of the women in the book also forces the male
reader to confront their past and how they fit into the modern-day World.
The
book's narrator represents a new generation of Japanese women who, while rejecting
much of Japanese cultural, social and political norms, have yet to strike out
in a new direction. Sarah Chihaya writes, "The idea that a woman, or
anyone for that matter, might be able to articulate and lay claim to exactly
what they want is laughably unsuited to these uncertain times. So what kinds of
novels can be written about women who may not want anything from a world that
may not have anything to offer them?".[3]
The
book is divided into two parts, Breasts and Eggs. I am not inclined to separate
the book into parts. The book deals with many problems of everyday life. Kawakami's
first chapter is titled "Are You Poor?". It must be said that
Kawakami is one of the few writers addressing the problems faced by working-class
women in society. Her work cuts across the money-grabbing women of the #MeToo movement
The
main character in the book is largely unconcerned with desirability, romance,
or sexual pleasure but has yet to find a replacement for these basic social mores.
She is not content with putting up with how she has been treated in the past
but has yet to formulate a social or political way forward. One feels this
novel is closer to the author's life than she may let on. The intensity of this
study of Japanese working-class women forces both male and female readers to re-examine
their own lives.
Kawakami
is a precise and razor-sharp writer who discusses complex and sensitive
subjects honestly and sensitively. She is a keen observer of the problems faced
by working-class women. As this brutally honest depiction of one of the
characters in the book shows, "Natsu sees everything and everyone she
encounters, including herself; its dryness saps the poignancy from statements
like "She reminded me of Mom." It is not that Natsu is devoid of
emotion—her sadness at the earlier loss of her beloved grandmother is apparent
throughout the novel. Yet that sadness, and her loneliness and estrangement, do
not lead to yearning or desire. Mothers and grandmothers haunt all of the women
in this novel, not just Natsu and Maki, but their ghosts do not emit the glow
of family romance. Rather, the spectral presences are reminders of the
accumulating malaise of the female body as it participates, willingly or
unwillingly, in the mingled economies of labour and sexual desire—as one of
Natsu's not-quite-friends unforgettably declares, their mothers and their
mothers before them were just "free labour with a pussy." While a
powerful bond of love joins these successive generations, it is a luxury that
contemporary women's schedules cannot often afford".
One
can see why the novel was harshly criticised in some conservative quarters
because it exposes the horrendous plight of working-class women in Japanese
society that treats them as second-class citizens.
As
Vrinda Nabar writes, "It is easy to understand the outrage caused by
Breasts and Eggs among a section of readers in Japan. Published in a newly
expanded form in English translation in April this year, the novel's
titillating title belies its upfront focus on themes that have less to do with
female anatomy and more with the ways many women have quietly subverted gender
roles. The discursive style allows its narrator Natsuko Natsume (a blogger
nobody reads), to touch on several aspects of a single woman's life in Tokyo".[4]
Like
all good writers, Kawakami draws heavily on her own experiences as a woman in
modern Japan. However, there is nothing parochial about her work as she
discusses universal themes of loneliness and sexuality in capitalist society. Her
novels have struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of her readers. I highly
recommend this book and cannot wait to read and review her new book. [5]
[1] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5128-engels-and-the-history-of-women-s-oppression
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/11/breasts-and-eggs-by-mieko-kawakami-review-an-interrogation-of-the-female-condition
[3] https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-new-york-review-of-books/20210429/281573768498656
[4] https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-breasts-and-eggs-a-novel-by-mieko-kawakami/story-gu4VLuf12Xofl726VXpTgM.html
[5] All The Lovers in the Night-Picador
2022
