On a hot summer's day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsu, 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 Midoriko, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother's self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsu's rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another. Ten years later, we meet Natsu again. She is now a writer and ?nds 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. This is an unforgettable full length English language debut from a major new international talent.

A strange and beguiling novel about three women struggling to determine their own lives in contemporary Tokyo, from Japan's most exciting young writer, Mieko Kawakami.

Mieko Kawakami started her career as a singer songwriter. Her first novella My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, published in 2007, was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Japan, and was awarded the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers. Her second novella Breasts and Eggs won the Akutagawa Prize and sold 250,000 copies. Kawakami's first full-length novel, Heaven, won the Ministry of Education's Fine Arts Award for Debut Work, as well as the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. Her collection of short stories Dreams of Love, Etc won the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize, and her collection of prose poems Sentan de sasuwa sasareruwa soraeewa (2006) was awarded the Nakahara Chuya Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for Japanese poetry. Breasts and Eggs is her first full length novel translated into English.