Breasts and Eggs

Review

I simply enjoyed reading this — there was something unembellished and direct about Natsuko's narrative voice that I particularly liked. The thematic developments were thought-provoking, but ultimately felt like they worked in service of Natsuko's character development rather than vice versa, which I preferred. I was surprised—and even disappointed?—by how invested I was in the only romantic storyline of the novel, but satisfied with its resolution.

At first, I felt a little bashful, hearing him say all these things about my work, but soon it felt like we were talking about something created by someone else entirely. It was a lonely, painful feeling, as if all of this was ancient history—the novel that I'd written, the fact that it had been published, the fact that I was a novelist who wrote books for a living, and even the feeling of wanting to write novels in the first place—these were things that happened long ago, to someone else entirely.