Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami,

By Picador

This kooky, courageous novel from literary sensation Mieko Kawakami sold a quarter of a million copies in her native Japan. Two sisters reunite in contemporary Tokyo, when elder Makiko, who works as a hostess back in Osaka, arrives with her 12-yearold daughter, Midoriko. The sisters grew up in a cramped two-room apartment, their drunken father chain-smoking and beating their mother. “Even as a kid I could tell he was a little man.” Then one day he disappears. Their mother dragged his stinking futon, heavy with sweat and nicotine, into the bath, where “she kicked the thing with everything she had”. Makiko has come to Tokyo for breast enhancement surgery. Midoriko has not spoken to her mother for a month. We hear her voice via her diary, as the scared loner navigates puberty on her own. Sisters Natsu and Makiko get drunk in a haze of hungry memories, and when aunt and niece ride a ferris wheel, Natsu spills the kindness of Midoriko’s mother to her when she was a neglected, bewildered child. Unforgettable.