Swallows

Summary

THE FIRST NOVEL IN ENGLISH IN MORE THAN FIFTEEN YEARS BY NATSUO KIRINO, AUTHOR OF THE SMASH HIT OUT, TELLS A TALE OF TWO TOKYOS, IN WHICH THE STRUGGLING AND THE WEALTHY COLLIDE OVER ONE OF THE MOST INTIMATE AND EMOTIONAL DECISIONS IN LIFE: WHETHER TO HAVE A CHILD.

Nothing has ever gone right for Riki. She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido for a better life in Tokyo, but as a temp with no job security she barely scrapes by, eating the same discount boiled egg for lunch and sometimes dinner. Desperate to make ends meet, she jumps at the chance to donate her own eggs with a large payoff.

Former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years, exploring every possible option. Then Motoi discovers a company exploiting a loophole in Japan’s strict surrogacy laws, offering them a glimmer of hope.

Opinions about the arrangement swirl from Yuko’s sex-obsessed, asexual best friend; Motoi’s controlling prima ballerina mother; and an affable sex-worker-slash-therapist.

Darkly funny and addictively page-turning, the novel pulls at the seams of society, reassessing our understanding of motherhood, self-worth, bodily autonomy, and class. Here is an acerbic, witty vision of contemporary Japan, and of a young woman’s fight to preserve her dignity—at any cost.

“A timely and engrossing drama about desire, precarity, and the uses of a woman’s body. Kirino’s psychologically compelling and sharp-witted storytelling draws us into her characters’ lives, leaving us to answer: Do our bodies have a price and who gets to decide?”—Ruth Ozeki, author of the Women’s Prize–winning The Book of Form and Emptiness