Swallows
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she’s ready to sell anything—even her womb—to escape the precarity of her life, an agency pairs her with a wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in heaven. She even looks a little like the wife. But is anything ever that simple?
One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2025
Nothing has ever gone right for Riki. She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido, where she worked at a nursing home, for a better life in Tokyo. But as a temp in the big city she has no job security, and barely scrapes by. She eats the same old discount boiled egg for lunch every day, sometimes for dinner, too. Many of her peers have to take on a side hustle just to make ends meet. So when her friend discovers an agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation, both leap at the chance for an interview.
Meanwhile, former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years. After trying what feels like every available option, it seems futile—until Motoi dives deep into his research and learns that, while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan, there is a company that’s found a loophole.
Before long, everyone has an opinion on the matter: from Yuko’s sex-obsessed, asexual best friend, to Motoi’s controlling prima ballerina mother, and even the affable sex-worker-slash-therapist that Riki has been to a couple of times, after she accepted a down payment to be a surrogate.
Acutely funny and addictively page-turning, Swallows pulls at the seams of society, reassessing our understanding of motherhood, self-worth, bodily autonomy, and class. What does it mean to be “in control”? And can money really buy happiness?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirino (Real World) serves up an entertaining and thought-provoking burlesque of the fertility industry in Tokyo. Office temp Riki Ōishi, 29, hopes to raise money by donating her eggs. During an interview with a reproductive agency, she's offered a far more lucrative opportunity: to serve as a surrogate mother for the agency's wealthy middle-aged clients Motoi and Yuko Kusaoke. Motoi, a former ballet star, is determined at all costs to pass on his genes. Despite being torn on whether to sacrifice her bodily autonomy in exchange for financial stability, Riki agrees to meet the Kusaokes to discuss the arrangement. It's a sacrifice for the couple, too, especially Yuko, whose IVF treatments failed, because according to Japanese law they must divorce and Riki must marry Motoi before she can be artificially inseminated. The parties come to terms, though, for the unthinkable sum of 10 million yen. Riki then chafes at Motoi's demands and blows a great deal of the down payment on a male sex worker. Yuko, meanwhile, has increasing doubts about the arrangement, especially after Riki gets pregnant and tells Yuko that she's not sure the child is Motoi's. Kirino builds tension with surprising twists as each of the three main characters contends with their shifting feelings about parenthood. This will keep readers glued to the page.
