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‘What use are eggs on their own?’ is a question that resounds through Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, a capacious, contrary novel about pregnancy which is inflected with anti-natalist ideas Initially asked by the narrator Natsuko’s sister, the question takes on a new urgency as Natsuko approaches forty She has no real doubt that she wants a child, despite being asexual and single, and facing pressure to follow up on her successful first novel Breasts and Eggs tackles the way she justifies this desire to herself, made near-impossible by the strictures of contemporary Japanese patriarchal society But Kawakami’s primary concern is not the experience of mothering, even as it recalls in scope and subject recent novels such as Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood More radically, Kawakami wants us to think not only about giving birth, but about the very experience of being born   Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, takes its characters and setting from a novella initially published in 2008 (and awarded Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize) We first meet Natsuko as a 30-year-old Osakan writer living hand-to-mouth in Tokyo, receiving a two-day visit during an overbearing summer from her older sister Makiko and her silent 12-year-old niece Midoriko, whose diary entries about the travails of puberty and sex education interweave with Natsuko’s narration Makiko – who works in an Osaka hostess bar and is worried about the effects of ageing on her employability – has come to the city to explore options for cheap breast augmentation, her obsession forcing a wedge between her and the other characters In the second half, set ten years later in 2017, Natsu procrastinates over her second book, while researching options for artificial insemination Her sexual identity is her biggest obstacle, emotional and practical: what right does she have to a child, she wonders, as an asexual woman who refuses the structure of normative coupling? Her research leads her to Aizawa, an advocate for non-anonymous donation, which is illegal in Japan, and his girlfriend Yuriko, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse The two encounters prove