Reproducing an Outside to Modernity at the Limit of the Law of Seriality: Reading Kawakami Mieko’s Breasts and Eggs

This essay offers a close reading of the female protagonist Natsuko’s account of childbirth in Kawakami Mieko’s Breasts and Eggs. It proceeds from scrutinizing a particular scene featuring a contradiction between the setting of hallucination and the agential implication to unfolding a non-normative reproductive desire that objectifies and fantasizes an outside to modernity. In my analysis of the scene featuring hallucination, I will argue that the contradiction in the hallucination marks the coming-into-being of a subjective I that emerges at the limit of the efficacy of the Law of the Father and the Law of the West. In the subsequent analysis where I unfold what type of I is being reproduced, I argue that fantasizing an outside to modernity smoothes out contradiction inherent in modernity. As manifest in Natsuko’s account of childbirth, the outside-ness she fantasizes and objectifies in the father she chooses for her child is reproduced in the child as extra-planetary in her imagination.