Mieko Kawakami
Författare till Breasts and Eggs
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Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Vedertaget namn
- Kawakami, Mieko
- Födelsedag
- 1976-08-29
- Kön
- female
- Nationalitet
- Japan
- Land (för karta)
- Japan
- Yrken
- novelist
singer
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Listor
Priser
Du skulle kanske också gilla
Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 26
- Även av
- 40
- Medlemmar
- 2,049
- Popularitet
- #12,557
- Betyg
- 3.7
- Recensioner
- 73
- ISBN
- 104
- Språk
- 15
- Favoritmärkt
- 2
From Book Two:
This is the antinatalist viewpoint, popularized in recent times by the philosopher David Benatar in his 2006 book [b:Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence|660518|Better Never to Have Been The Harm of Coming into Existence|David Benatar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348531771l/660518._SY75_.jpg|646592]. Writing, "It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place," Benatar traces this idea back to Sophocles (“Never to have been born is best") and even into the Bible ("I have praised the dead that are already dead more than the living that are yet alive; but better than both of them is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun" - Ecclesiastes).
Benatar argues that there is a mismatch between pleasure and pain. While pleasure's presence is good and pain's presence is bad, pleasure's absence is not bad if there is no one existing to miss it, while pain's absence is always good. Since existing results in both pleasure and pain, while not existing results in missing pleasure, which is not bad, and missing pain, which is good, not existing is better. Thus the ethical choice is to not have children, to not bring a being into existence as it would have been better off not existing.
Book Two of Breasts and Eggs presents this argument and asks if it convinces an adult considering procreation, while Book One asks, from the point of view of a child, if it's true or not. Kawakami's text doesn't offer a clear answer I don't think, leaving it to the reader to consider if they so choose to... not being a question that most people actually ever consider, I don't think.
In Book One, originally an independent novella, a woman in Tokyo is visited by her sister and 12 year old niece. The niece, Midoriko, is suffering through the early stages of adolescence and has stopped talking to her single mother, Makiko, only writing short responses to her on a pad of paper. Makiko drinks to escape her own pain and has come to Tokyo for a breast implant consultation, something she has become obsessed with. The combination of her own painful transition into womanhood and her mother's painful experiencing of womanhood has pushed Midoriko into a highly charged but blocked emotional state.
This impasse breaks open in a stunning scene in her aunt Natsuko's kitchen in Tokyo. She confronts her mother, sobbing, smashing raw eggs into her own head, begging for something that she's unable to clearly articulate. Makiko is unable to provide her daughter a verbal reassurance that makes sense, that makes all the suffering understandable and true. So,
This award winning novella is fantastic. Powerful and tight and a perfect length, and as above, occasionally funny in the middle of all of it. For its English language publication, a second story has been added afterwards picking these characters up about a decade later. This second story is twice as long, far more meandering and a bit of a slog to get through though not without merit as well. It features Natsuko, now a successful writer struggling to finish a second novel, while perhaps actually more focused on how she can have a child. Single and asexual, as a woman in Japan she faces high barriers to fulfilling a desire she can't quite rationally explain the existence of, but which nevertheless powerfully drives her onward, even in the face of another character's arguments against having children as noted above.
There's a lot of discussion in this second section about what it means to have a child and what it means to be a woman, either with children or childless/childfree. How the characters deal with and try to escape the misogyny that surrounds them. There's also a lot of sagging exposition that makes it harder to enjoy and recommend it.
5 stars for Book One, 3 stars for Book Two, so 4 stars together.… (mer)