Mieko Kawakami (born 1976) is a Japanese novelist and poet from Osaka. She began her literary career as a poet before turning increasingly to fiction and received the Akutagawa Prize for "Breasts and Eggs" in 2008. She later won the Murasaki Shikibu Prize for "Heaven," the Tanizaki Prize for "Ai no Yume to ka," and the Yomiuri Prize for Literature for "Kiiroi Ie." Her fiction explores the female body, sexuality, reproduction, poverty, and family through a distinctive style shaped by everyday speech and an intense attention to physical experience. Her representative novel, "Natsu Monogatari," published in English as "Breasts and Eggs," follows Natsuko, a writer from a poor family in Osaka, her sister Makiko, who is considering breast augmentation, and Makiko's adolescent daughter Midoriko, who is struggling with the changes in her own body. Years later, Natsuko begins considering having a child through donor insemination, and the novel follows her encounters with different ideas about reproduction, parenthood, and the ethics of bringing another person into the world.
