Mieko Kawakami: ‘Women are no longer content to shut up’ | Books

Mieko Kawakami began writing partly to explore the “randomness and strangeness” of life – so it is oddly fitting that the release of her novel Breasts and Eggs (Chichi to Ran in Japanese) has suddenly been upended by a worldwide pandemic. After building up a loyal following in Japan over the decade, Kawakami was all set to go global, attending festivals in the US and Europe, before Covid-19 hit. Still, being stuck at home with her young son has provided plenty of grist for her feminist mill.

“It’s just assumed that mothers will accept the burden,” she says, over tea at a cafe in the suburbs of west Tokyo. “We’ll look after the children, teach them, prepare the bento and do all that extra work – even though many of us have jobs too.” The rot starts from the top; she recalls a publicity photo of the government’s first, and all-male, coronavirus taskforce.

“I was sort of dumbfounded,” she laughs. “Did the virus wipe out all the women? How could they know anything about what it is like to be a mother? They don’t even understand there’s a problem.”

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.

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 The Night Belongs to Lovers (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. 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.

Her other job, she says, is to help dispatch the orientalist cliches that have riddled fiction about Japan for decades. Murakami excepted, the published canon – she cites Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata as examples – is full of stock imagery of “geisha and Mt Fuji”.

“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.”

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.

Kawakami says that when she was starting out, her image of feminism was “hysterical old women on TV … But as you get older it just seems so obvious for women to be feminist.” Men struggle to understand women’s bodies, she says: “They don’t experience pregnancy or postnatal depression, for one.” But battling patriarchy can be exhausting, and begins at home; she laughingly compares her marriage, to fellow author Kazushige Abe, to a “war”.

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), 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.”

Parenting has dented her productivity – she now writes just three hours a day – but not her passion for women’s causes. Change is coming, she believes. “Women are no longer content to shut up,” she says, citing recent protests over workplace rules forcing Japanese women to wear high heels, and banning glasses because it gave customers a “cold impression”. “Young women in their 20s are much freer than we were to speak up,” she says, though she also laments that there’s a long way to go yet. “I notice that women in their 40s with a certain status, like me, don’t get attacked but women in their 20s do. The lesson is that men won’t give up their privileges easily. They’re brainwashed: be strong, don’t cry. But everyone gets old and understands what it is to be weak. We’re at the point where all that old stuff must be questioned.”