Popular Culture and Gender Disparity in Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs

Contemporary female novelists in Japan explore everyday experiences of modern women with a penetrating insight and sincerity that seeks to unfold social and cultural processes by which gender discourses operate in our lives. Sociologists have explained that women’s desire for hypergamy in Japan derives from the gender-unequal Japanese labour market and fare governed by such factors as women’s low income, their economic deprivation, and their loss of jobs on marriage and childbirth. Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a novel that has won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. In the novel, the narrator faces dilemmas that are timely in Japan but also speak to a global audience. The novel paints a convincing image of contemporary womanhood in Japan by depicting quotidian life as lived by several women. The novel deals with larger issues such as women’s oppression, precarity, domestic violence, reproductive ethics, and justice and technology. This paper intends to discuss modernist approaches in the novel and seeks to understand feminist concerns that are raised in the text with prominent narrative focus on women’s bodies.