In the first part, Natsuko's sister, Makiko (巻子), and her 12-year-old daughter, Midoriko (緑子), arrive in Tokyo from Osaka.

In the second part, set years later, Natsuko contemplates becoming a mother and the options open to her as an older single woman in Japan.

The first half of Natsu Monogatari is a completely rewritten version of the original 2008 novella Chichi to Ran.

[11] Sarah Chihaya, in The New York Review of Books, said that "Reading Mieko Kawakami's novel Breasts and Eggs, one experiences the pain of women coming to terms with what they do and don't want, almost too acutely.

Furthermore, she lauded the book's tackling of difficult and intimate subjects pertaining to women: "Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body—its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions.

"[15] Gayathri Sowrirajan, writing for The Sociological Review, said that "Breasts and Eggs looks at the various moral, practical and bureaucratic factors that need to be accounted for while deciding to bring a new life into the world.

It is a sharp critique of biopolitics under neoliberalism [...] The book neither passes judgement on individuals' choices nor gives any solutions to the difficult questions it poses.

It will, however, make you confront complex questions about life, identity, love, kinship and death and will stay with you long after you are done reading it, showing the value of fiction for sociology.