--- product_id: 321790583 title: "Breasts and Eggs: A powerful and intimate novel about what it means to be a woman in modern Japan" price: "133 Lei" currency: RON in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.ro/products/321790583-breasts-and-eggs-a-powerful-and-intimate-novel-about-what store_origin: RO region: Romania --- # 4.1/5 from 4,358 readers Set in contemporary Tokyo Bestselling novel #17,628 Breasts and Eggs: A powerful and intimate novel about what it means to be a woman in modern Japan **Price:** 133 Lei **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 📖 Unlock the untold stories of modern womanhood — don’t miss the novel everyone’s talking about! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Breasts and Eggs: A powerful and intimate novel about what it means to be a woman in modern Japan - **How much does it cost?** 133 Lei with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ro](https://www.desertcart.ro/products/321790583-breasts-and-eggs-a-powerful-and-intimate-novel-about-what) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Intimate Portrait of Womanhood:** Dive deep into the raw, unfiltered lives of three Japanese women navigating identity, beauty, and motherhood. - • **A Must-Read for Thought Leaders:** Perfect for professionals craving nuanced stories that challenge cultural norms and spark meaningful dialogue. - • **Seamless, Captivating Translation:** Experience Mieko Kawakami’s powerful narrative in flawless English by expert translators. - • **Critically Acclaimed & Award-Shortlisted:** Join the conversation around a New York Times Notable Book and Warwick Prize finalist. - • **Bold Exploration of Modern Feminine Challenges:** From breast augmentation to IVF, confront the societal pressures shaping womanhood today. ## Overview Breasts and Eggs is a bestselling, critically acclaimed novel by Mieko Kawakami that explores the intimate struggles of three women in contemporary Tokyo. With a seamless English translation, it delves into themes of beauty, aging, motherhood, and societal expectations, earning accolades including a New York Times Notable Book and a Warwick Prize shortlist. Highly rated by thousands of readers, this powerful narrative offers a bold, thought-provoking look at what it means to be a woman in modern Japan. ## Description The bestselling novel about three women struggling to determine their own lives in contemporary Tokyo. 'Breathtaking' – Haruki Murakami, author of Norwegian Wood A New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year' and one of Elena Ferrante's 'Top 40 Books by Female Authors'. Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by her daughter, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsuko’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another. Eight years later, we meet Natsuko again. She is now a writer and finds herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer and her family’s past as she faces her own uncertain future. In Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. 'Bold, modern and surprising' – An Yu, author of Braised Pork 'Incredible and propulsive' – Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times Review: beautiful book - loveeee meiko kawakami, wonderful book Review: Really good - definitely will read more of the author - Breasts and Eggs is a Tokyo-based story set in two different parts. The first section (Breasts) follows the narrator Natsuko as she is visited by her older sister Makiko and her teenage niece Midoriko. Makiko has come to Tokyo to look into breast augmentation surgery, and Midoriko is having a hard time with this, alongside all the other horrors of being a young teenage girl on the verge of a whole load of body/hormonal changes. The second part of the book (Eggs) follows Natsuko on her own, around 10 years later, as she continues to pursue her career of being an author and looks into finally having her own child via IVF which is complicated in itself as a single woman. This story was just so interesting and well-written with a character who I felt was peeled back and revealed to us layer by layer as she continue to dive into the core of her being, and examining her wishes and desires. First off, the translation of this book is really excellent. I'm no expert by any means but I found it just so easy to read, the language and writing flowed really, really well. Absolutely seamless. I thought the exploration of Natsuko in this book was so thought-provoking and hard-hitting as well as just all kinds of raw. The book very much explores what it means to be a woman, particularly in Japanese society, and everything that comes with that mark of being a woman - being young and beautiful, and if not young, making yourself look as perfect as you can through beauty treatments and invasive surgery. The fears of growing older but also just growing up - how terrifying it can be to be on the periphery of girl to woman, and knowing all the different things your body will go through for years and years, and feeling disconnected from that body somehow because of the horror of it all. And then making decisions about motherhood, how womanhood and being a mother are linked in different ways whether you have a child, or remain childless. How it can define you even if you don't want it to. One of the things I found very interesting was the discussions around IVF/sperm donation and women choosing to have children without a partner. I didn't know there was so much red tape for single women who wanted to have a child and the sometimes dangerous ways women would have to choose to have a child via sperm donation if they want one. Loads of big questions here too around the population of the world and if it's ethical to have any children at all seeing as no-one asks to be born. You can take a lot from that, and everyone will probably have a different opinion. Natsuko goes through a lot in this book, and I feel like we just see her on the edge of a lot of things all the time. I just wanted her to keep going, and trying and believing in herself. I always felt like she could give a little bit more to everything. I did think for a while this would be a 5-star read for me but it did lose me near the end, as I felt just a little bit fatigued by the story I think. I also did miss the inclusion of Makiko and Midoriko in the later story as I felt like they were so interesting in the first half and they both had great but different dynamics with Natsuko. ## Features - New Store Stock ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | 17,628 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 636 in Women's Literary Fiction (Books) 2,442 in Literary Fiction (Books) 3,790 in Contemporary Fiction (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.1 out of 5 stars 4,358 Reviews | ## Images ![Breasts and Eggs: A powerful and intimate novel about what it means to be a woman in modern Japan - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71jutLy-lyS.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ beautiful book *by H***H on 29 December 2025* loveeee meiko kawakami, wonderful book ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Really good - definitely will read more of the author *by A***E on 14 April 2022* Breasts and Eggs is a Tokyo-based story set in two different parts. The first section (Breasts) follows the narrator Natsuko as she is visited by her older sister Makiko and her teenage niece Midoriko. Makiko has come to Tokyo to look into breast augmentation surgery, and Midoriko is having a hard time with this, alongside all the other horrors of being a young teenage girl on the verge of a whole load of body/hormonal changes. The second part of the book (Eggs) follows Natsuko on her own, around 10 years later, as she continues to pursue her career of being an author and looks into finally having her own child via IVF which is complicated in itself as a single woman. This story was just so interesting and well-written with a character who I felt was peeled back and revealed to us layer by layer as she continue to dive into the core of her being, and examining her wishes and desires. First off, the translation of this book is really excellent. I'm no expert by any means but I found it just so easy to read, the language and writing flowed really, really well. Absolutely seamless. I thought the exploration of Natsuko in this book was so thought-provoking and hard-hitting as well as just all kinds of raw. The book very much explores what it means to be a woman, particularly in Japanese society, and everything that comes with that mark of being a woman - being young and beautiful, and if not young, making yourself look as perfect as you can through beauty treatments and invasive surgery. The fears of growing older but also just growing up - how terrifying it can be to be on the periphery of girl to woman, and knowing all the different things your body will go through for years and years, and feeling disconnected from that body somehow because of the horror of it all. And then making decisions about motherhood, how womanhood and being a mother are linked in different ways whether you have a child, or remain childless. How it can define you even if you don't want it to. One of the things I found very interesting was the discussions around IVF/sperm donation and women choosing to have children without a partner. I didn't know there was so much red tape for single women who wanted to have a child and the sometimes dangerous ways women would have to choose to have a child via sperm donation if they want one. Loads of big questions here too around the population of the world and if it's ethical to have any children at all seeing as no-one asks to be born. You can take a lot from that, and everyone will probably have a different opinion. Natsuko goes through a lot in this book, and I feel like we just see her on the edge of a lot of things all the time. I just wanted her to keep going, and trying and believing in herself. I always felt like she could give a little bit more to everything. I did think for a while this would be a 5-star read for me but it did lose me near the end, as I felt just a little bit fatigued by the story I think. I also did miss the inclusion of Makiko and Midoriko in the later story as I felt like they were so interesting in the first half and they both had great but different dynamics with Natsuko. ### ⭐⭐⭐ The Right to Procreate *by J***G on 23 September 2022* The anti-heroine in Kawakami’s whimsically and provocatively titled novel is centred on a budding writer, whose real name, Natsuko Natsume is often wrongly assumed to be a pseudonym. Much else is misunderstood about Natsu, such as her wish to be a single parent via artificial insemination from a sperm donor. Natsu has ruled out having a baby in the “conventional” manner, as she is adverse to sex, having had a broken relationship because of it. Perhaps her impoverished background and abandonment of the family by her father are contributing factors to her views on marriage and family, though this is not a link the author makes explicit. Natsu’s biological clock is ticking, even as she struggles career-wise to realise her dreams of writing more than one measly novel to make a living and wonders about the practicalities of having another mouth to feed. As such, this novel appears to be somewhat of a feminist manifesto that reclaims the woman’s autonomy and her own body’s reproductive rights against societal norms and expectations. But partway through the novel, complications enter Natsu’s life, in the form of Aizawa, a donor-conceived child, now an adult looking for his progenitor. He alerts Natsu to the implications on her future child’s life if she should proceed on this venture. Is it not selfish to deprive a child of a relationship with her father? What ensues is a series of philosophical and ethical debates between them and other viewpoints from the people in Natsu’s life as she comes to reconsider her decision. What appears to move a little predictably (no spoilers here) is somewhat thwarted by a sleight of hand, which, to me, was a little forced, as if Kawakami was too determined for her novel to stay the course against type, in its conclusion. Nonetheless, this was an interesting-enough novel, though I was not as fully engaged in it as I has thought I would be. ## Frequently Bought Together - Picador Breasts and Eggs - Heaven - All The Lovers In The Night --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.ro/products/321790583-breasts-and-eggs-a-powerful-and-intimate-novel-about-what](https://www.desertcart.ro/products/321790583-breasts-and-eggs-a-powerful-and-intimate-novel-about-what) --- *Product available on Desertcart Romania* *Store origin: RO* *Last updated: 2026-08-24*