Sign-In
Cart
Swallows
Audio Book
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Recorded Books
Published: Sep 9 2025
Language: English
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
Also from
Kirino, Natsuo
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paperback