# Breasts and Eggs

- Author: Mieko Kawakami
- Translator: Sam Bett and David Boyd
- Original title (Japanese): 夏物語
- First published: 2019
- Publisher: Europa Editions
- This edition: 2021
- ISBN: 9781609456702
- Shelf: Japanese Literature in Translation

## Card

A writer from Osaka hosts her sister and silent niece for a hot summer visit, and years later faces her own question about having a child.  
The voice is frank, funny, and close to the body, and long conversations in small rooms carry much of the weight.  
For a night of summer heat, windows open.  

## About this book

Natsuko is a struggling writer in Tokyo when her older sister, Makiko, arrives from Osaka with her daughter, Midoriko, who has stopped speaking and writes only in a notebook. Makiko is set on breast-enhancement surgery. In the second part, a decade later, Natsuko, now living alone in her late thirties, wonders whether to become a mother on her own. The book stays with money, bodies, family, and the question of who gets to choose.

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