Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
Published 2019 · 480 pages · 115,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Feminist Literature, Literary Fiction
How hard is Breasts and Eggs to read?
Breasts and Eggs scores 24 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
- Literary vocabulary with medical specificity about the body.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Philosophical questions about motherhood and bodily autonomy grounded in lived experience.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Dense with physical and emotional detail.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Two-part structure with a decade gap. Midoriko's silence as indirect communication.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- Breasts and eggs as literal and symbolic markers of female biology.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Natsuko's clear-eyed narration provides critical distance from social norms.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Natsuko's decision is made but its consequences remain open.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Two distinct parts spanning a decade. Multiple narrators in Part 1.
How Breasts and Eggs is regarded
Breasts and Eggs holds a literary regard score of 47 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.