Breasts and Eggs and the Memory Police
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Ep. 94 | Breasts and Eggs and The Memory Police [00:00:09] Kendra Hello, I'm Kendra Winchester, here with Sachi Argabright. And this is Reading Women, a podcast inviting you to reclaim half the bookshelf by discussing books written by or about women. And this is episode 94, where we're talking about THE MEMORY POLICE by Yoko Ogawa and BREASTS AND EGGS by Mieko Kawakami. [00:00:27] Sachi You can find a complete transcript and a list of all the books mentioned today linked in our show notes. And don't forget to subscribe, so you don't miss a single episode. [00:00:36] Kendra So it is Women in Translation Month, and we're celebrating by talking about Asian women writers. [00:00:42] Sachi Yeah! [00:00:44] Kendra Yeah. So I am so excited. I just love Women in Translation Month. And I have found more books on audio this year than I ever have before. So my TBR is great. [00:00:56] Sachi Yeah, it's a huge win. [00:00:59] Kendra Yeah. So I thought we could talk a little bit about why Meytal created Women in Translation Month and kind of how it's expanded to beyond the original idea to just like celebration of all these women in translation. [00:01:13] Sachi Awesome. [00:01:14] Kendra Over . I will link in the show notes a page that on the official Women in Translation Month website of her stats. I love stats. [00:01:22] Sachi Oh yeah. We are stats people over here. [00:01:25] Kendra Oh yes. I could stare at these graphs for ages. But the general summary is that approximately 30 percent of new translations into English are books by women writers. [00:01:37] Sachi Yes. [00:01:38] Kendra That might shock some people, but Amazon Crossing is publishing more women in translation than any other publisher. [00:01:44] Sachi Which to me is so very surprising, I feel. [00:01:47] Kendra Yeah. You know, I was like, what? But I went and looked. And they have a big push for world literature every year. And they offer like free titles to Amazon Prime members. And they're more likely to go to audio because they have Audible right there next door, as it were. It's fascinating. [00:02:07] Sachi Interesting. I didn't know that. [00:02:09] Kendra And it's also important to note that certain languages are more likely to be published into English than others. Of course, these are, you know, Western European languages like French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Which I mean, that's not really surprising. [00:02:25] Sachi No, I figure. If I were to guess, like, what area of the . or, you know, geography wise . what general area would be translated the most, my guess would kind of be Europe. [00:02:39] Kendra The white people countries! [00:02:44] Sachi Yes. Yes. But I do see on the chart, Arabic and Chinese are shortly after Italian. So I think that's good. [00:02:52] Kendra Yeah! I wonder what the breakdown is between Cantonese and Mandarin. [00:02:57] Sachi Yeah. I'd be very interested to see that. [00:03:00] Kendra I think that's absolutely fascinating. A friend of mine who is one of the hosts for Women in Translation Month Readathon, which we do over on BookTube, noted that she studied languages in Eastern Europe. And like there are so few women writers translated from Eastern European languages. So one of her big books is she's promoting this year is a book by a Hungarian woman, which I will link in the show notes some additional things that we've mentioned in this little preamble. But I think it's so fascinating, and it's something that I just don't see talked about much on the bookternet. [00:03:36] Sachi No. Yeah, I feel like, you know, Women in Translation gets its buzz in August. But like even these stats, like I've participated in Women in Translation Month probably for the last three years, and I've never actually, like, gone out to the site and looked at the stats. So I feel like it's probably something that needs to be brought to light more because I think we all just kind of highlight it for a month, maybe don't look into it too much, but just maybe take from the TBRs some of the stuff that you have in your stocks that are translations and just kind of move on. And that's something that I need to do better, too, at just reading more translated works throughout the year and even reading books, you know, that are from not American authors throughout the year. And seeing these stats and focusing a lot more through this theme has definitely helped me personally as well. [00:04:24] Kendra I really appreciate what the creator has done this year with noting even more marginalized groups within the Women in Translation Month category. So she has set up some prompts for 2020. Again, I'll link that in the show notes. But some of them are, you know, read African women, read Indigenous women. Translated, obviously, from their original languages. Read. Middle Eastern women, queer women, and South Asian women. And she points out to these groups that she has seen from the stats that they are also even more underrepresented than other kinds of women in translation, which I really appreciated that she did that. [00:05:03] Sachi Yeah, that's very helpful and very enlightening. [00:05:08] Kendra Awesome. All right. Well, I think it's time to get into our discussion picks. [00:05:13] Sachi Sounds great. Can't wait. [00:05:15] Kendra All right. So I have the first one. And that is BREASTS AND EGGS by Mieko Kawakami. And that's translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, and this is out from Europa. Fun fact: the translators, I believe, split up the translation; one did the prose predominantly, and one did the dialogue. [00:05:34] Sachi Which, when you mentioned that to me earlier, I was shocked because I initially thought that one had done book one . because the book, like we mentioned on the previous episode, the book is split into two parts. Book one, which is BREASTS, and then in book two, which is EGGS. And I figured that one had taken one, and the other had had taken the second one. And not the case! [00:06:01] Kendra Yeah, yeah. I was blown away by that. And Jaclyn read this before I did. And basically via the internet shoved the book into my hands and was like, "Read this." [00:06:14] Sachi Well, good. Because you told me then, and I loved it too. So I guess Jaclyn is the one that we should really be giving our claps to, right? [00:06:21] Kendra Yes. There's so many great books coming out from Europa. And so sometimes I lose track of them all. And then, originally, I hadn't really been looking at this book because there wasn't an audiobook. But the audiobook was delayed and came out later. So I was able to listen to it. And I'm so glad. This book is fabulous. So like we said, this is originally published in 2019 in Japanese and then was translated and just came out this past spring here in English. And so the first book, what we could call BREASTS, focuses on the narrator and her sister and her niece who have come to visit her in Tokyo from Osaka. And her sister wants a boob job. And there's lots of discussions about women's bodies and trying to make them more acceptable for men's eyes. And the links . like . dying your nipples, essentially. I just never knew any of this information. And like, what man is worth that? You know? [00:07:25] Sachi I know. [00:07:26] Kendra But at the same time, her sister was like, this is for me in many ways. [00:07:31] Sachi Right. [00:07:31] Kendra And it was just so interesting . kind of situation and conversations to kind of be a fly on a wall for with this novel. [00:07:39] Sachi Right. Because, like, Natsu, who's the protagonist, and then her sister, Makiko, who is considering the kind of breast enhancement. She works. Makiko works in, like, I think it's like a bar or something and kind of takes, you know, to some extent maybe some hostess-type duties. And so I was thinking, Okay, you know, that from the gaze of like, I'm satisfying male customers, so I want to do this because I feel pressure as this is the acceptable thing. I felt that. And then when she started talking about, like, nipple color, I was like, wait, no one's going to see that. Like, this is just pressure that she's getting, you know, from the outside world, even just like in personally to really affect her self-esteem, to say. I think that even Natsu even says like, "Well, who's going to see that?" She's like, "Well, just me." And she's like, "Okay?". [00:08:41] Kendra Yeah.