Halfway through ‘Breasts and Eggs’

Since I don’t really know what to tell you about today, I’ll just talk about the book I’m (still) reading - ‘Breasts and Eggs’ by Mieko Kawakami. I wrote ‘(still)’ and then I checked when I started it… it was only 10 days ago. However, my current relationship with time is another story.

For a long time, I didn’t give Asian culture and hence literature any mind, even though I had friends who recommended me manga, anime, music etc. 22 years later, I feel like I’ve missed out. This book is really good and from a literary perspective, it covers a lot of the universal contemporary agenda. If English/American literature was impacted by 9/11, ‘Breasts and Eggs’ mentions the 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima disaster, so it’s well connected to its target readers and beyond, touching on something they feel strongly about. It talks about femininity, sexuality, family, and motherhood, and it has this ‘meta-level’ in which the protagonist is a writer as well, so she talks about the process, publishing, awards, and whatnot. Between this and Rachel Cusk’s ‘Outline’ trilogy (to pick something with a similar theme), I much prefer ‘Breasts and Eggs’.

The one thing that I’m still very weary of is the translation. As much as I’d love more Romanian books to be translated into English and find an international readership when I’m reading a translated piece, I’m wondering what nuances got lost, and what changed… Always a dilemma.