David McNeill*1 “Mieko Kawakami: 'Women are no longer content to shut up'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/18/mieko-kawakami-interview-breasts-and-eggs-haruki-murakami *2
2020年の記事。川上未映子さん*3へのインタヴュー。
『乳と卵』について。石原慎太郎*4のリアクション；
村上春樹との関係；
Kawakami has made her name articulating womanhood in Japan better than any living author. Breasts and Eggs, originally written as a blog in the punchy dialect of her native Osaka, yanked working-class women off the literary sidelines, published in 2008. At its centre is Makiko, an ageing bar hostess and single mother to Midoriko, her reproachful adolescent daughter, who will only communicate with her in writing. As younger women begin displacing Makiko in a workplace hierarchy determined by male desire, she begins to obsess over her nipples and sagging boobs. Maybe breast implants would give her the “kind of body that you see in girly magazines”.The novel dropped like a bomb on the heavily male world of Japanese fiction, smuggling weighty questions into its breezy, discursive style. What are women’s options once they become mothers? What makes them want kids anyway? Why are they chained to unreasonable expectations of their bodies? Traditionalists naturally despised it; Shintaro Ishihara, then Tokyo’s governor and himself a former novelist, called it “unpleasant and intolerable”. Criticism from one of the grandees of conservative Japanese politics didn’t stop the novel selling 250,000 copies.
「オリエンタリスト的クリシェ」への反発；
Kawakami has since scooped up prizes for fiction, poetry and short stories in Japan, and foreign readers are about to discover what all the fuss is about, with more than a dozen translations of Breasts and Eggs in the works. Heaven, from 2009, will be published in English in 2021, followed by All The Lovers In The Night (from 2013) in 2022. She has won a tribute from Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most famous novelist; like a tree that can be counted on to reach for the sky or a river to flow towards the sea, he said, Kawakami “is always ceaselessly growing and evolving”.Kawakami was delighted at this hat-tip from one of the icons of Japanese fiction, but she didn’t play entirely nice when the two met in 2017 for a series of interviews*5. She respectfully, but firmly, probed the sexism that she saw lurking within Murakami’s fiction. “I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function,” she said, lamenting the frequency that his women are “sacrificed” for the sake of the male leads.
Murakami seemed a little taken aback by this charge, replying: “I’m not interested in individualistic characters. And that applies to men and women both.” But it was a sign of a changing of the guard: if the ground was going to shift under the Japanese literary landscape, some men were going to squirm. Now, Kawakami insists she loves Murakami’s work, but stoutly defends her line of interrogation. “I believed it was absolutely my job to ask about it,” she said.
水商売、それから歌手；
“We thought all that was gone 20 years ago but it hasn’t at all,” she says. Japan’s literary universe is “still odd, cute and a bit mysterious”, she says and its concerns minor. “But we’re not like that at all. I don’t want to write books that perpetuate that image. I want to write about real people.”
「関心事」としての「子ども」；
Kawakami grew up poor in Osaka. She had what she describes as a “difficult” relationship with her largely absent father. At 14, she began working in a factory to support her family, making heaters and electric fans. “But I was always quite a philosophical child, asking odd questions and in a hurry to grow up.” Later, like Makiko, she worked as a hostess, a temporary route for some working-class girls out of poverty and dead-end jobs. It was a far cry from the lives of her contemporaries, many graduates from Japan’s top universities.In a different life, she could have been a professional singer; she was several albums into a short career, but she quit after learning how little control she had. “I was not even allowed to write my own lyrics,” she says. Decamping to the fusty literary world might not have seemed the best idea. Yet, her first blogs, delving frankly into sex, family and womanhood, were devoured by fans hungry for an unsentimental and new female voice that didn’t condescend. Blogging also gave her the freedom to reach her readers directly, bypassing the male-run industry.
If her main literary preoccupation is the lives of women, her other is children. She describes childhood as a “hell”. In her work, kids often become the victims of struggling, unhappy parents, their lonely, confessional voices resonating throughout. In her novella Ms Ice Sandwich, published recently in English (translated by Louise Heal Kawai)*6, the young narrator’s father is dead, while his self-obsessed mother is oblivious to her son’s first crush, on a young woman working behind the counter of his local supermarket.“I try to write from the child’s perspective – how they see the world,” says Kawakami. “Coming to the realisation that you’re alive is such a shock. One day, we’re thrown into life with no warning. And at some point, every one of us will die. It’s very hard to comprehend.” She has said that the shock and fear and resignation created by this incomprehensibility are at the core of her writing. “We often talk about death being absolute, but I can’t help but think that being born is no less final.”
Motherhood only deepens the mystery at the core of our existence. “There’s beauty and violence to making another human being,” she says. “You’re creating a life but you know it ends in death.” She ponders this more as she watches her son grow up. “When I see him in his sleep and think of his future, if he gets sick and has to go through pain, I realise that I’m the person who actually began his life. I started this – it was solely done through my desire.”
*1:See also https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20071213/1197559069 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20090813/1250132039 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20100311/1268328929 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20101121/1290309642 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20110603/1307125019 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2026/04/26/091825
*2:Mentioned in https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2026/04/26/091825
*3:See also https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20161121/1479732505 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20170810/1502339917 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20180430/1525111855 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2019/07/15/182042 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2019/12/04/020428 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2020/05/28/114129 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2020/06/28/103403 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2020/07/16/104924 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2021/07/02/085816 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2023/04/04/110723 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2023/05/01/111209 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2024/03/25/134518 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2025/04/13/095858 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2025/10/07/143419 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2025/10/13/010507 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2026/04/26/091825
*4:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060410/1144636844 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060430/1146374995 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060831/1157027021 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060918/1158548179 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20061106/1162827266 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20061111/1163243740 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20061118/1163845906 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070225/1172421318 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070306/1173200489 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070415/1176606885 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070418/1176869274 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080114/1200293046 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080305/1204725934 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080614/1213420843 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080726/1217051072 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20090208/1234026998 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20090706/1246825752 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091002/1254502738 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091129/1259488849 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100305/1267767495 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100419/1271645099 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100420/1271729350 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100423/1272044223 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100426/1272309085 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100606/1275759613 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100619/1276975557 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100620/1277038368 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100903/1283488570 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100925/1285387758 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101019/1287455134 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101205/1291518836 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101208/1291778596 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101210/1292006456 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101215/1292353461 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110120/1295532154 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110206/1297019853 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110218/1298052067 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110315/1300158151 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110331/1301594464 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110401/1301647461 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110415/1302891198 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110426/1303840125 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110429/1304054739 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110506/1304625968 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110705/1309874508 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110727/1311790165 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110815/1313428814 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110825/1314272990 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110918/1316350893 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20111204/1323005896 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20120206/1328534004 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20120211/1328983593 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20120503/1336029509 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20120926/1348654542 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20121124/1353736726 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20130605/1370397728 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/20130724/1374640501 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*5:『みみずくは黄昏に飛び立つ』。
*6:日本語では「ミス・アイスサンドイッチ」は、続編の「苺ジャムから苺をひけば」とともに『あこがれ』という単行本になっているが、英語では独立して単行本になっているのか？
