Author Kawakami: "I want to destabilize my readers"
Photo: Wakaba Noda / DumontMany Japanese women call their husbands "rulers". It's just a word, a salutation, and yet it says everything about the relationship between the sexes. "In Japan the patriarchy has the status of a religion," says Mieko Kawakami. Women should worship their husbands, submit to him. It was like that 100 years ago, and it is often like that today.
It is all the more astonishing that an author who resists this role model is celebrating successes in Japan. Kawakami, 43 years old, writes about characters that shouldn't really exist: their protagonists are single parents, disappointed in men or not even interested in them. In Japanese society such women are often considered a strange rarity. In Kawakami's books, they are lonely heroines.
Kawakami's best-known book has now been published in German: "Breasts and Eggs" won an important literary prize in Japan, and bestselling author Haruki Murakami called it "breathtaking". The novel tells the story of Natsuko Natsume, who escaped poverty and now works as a writer. Natsuko lives alone in Tokyo and wants a child. The problem: she hates sex. The only partnership she has ever had failed because: "I wanted to be with him, exchange ideas with him, see things with him, grow old with him. But I was reluctant to do that."
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