Swallows - by Natsuo Kirino (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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?

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?

Review Quotes

*One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2025*

"Natsuo Kirino's novels bring us into direct contact with human life. Her fearless pen forces us to confront the ugliness, intensity and depth of our own desires, to the point that we cannot look away. But just as those desires reach a fever-pitch, she restores our faith in humanity, in a way that only Kirino can. The relentless beauty of her stories leave me breathless every time." --Mieko Kawakami, author of Breasts and Eggs

"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

"Frank, tender, expansive, and radically embodied, Swallows explores the forces that permit some people to exchange resources for freedom and oblige others to exchange freedom for resources. Luminous." --Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

"A masterful feat of storytelling as well as a biting critique of gender, patrimony and class.... A writer in effortless command of her craft, Kirino brilliantly upends our expectations at every twist and turn. Just when you thought things could not get any more complicated, she deftly ups the ante. The resulting tension builds to a startling ending that both disturbs and delights." --Julie Otsuka, author of The Swimmers

"A witty portrayal of surrogacy that confronts the injustices of class and gender imbalances in Japanese society... skillfully light in tone, a quality Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda captures in her translation. . . . Kirino somersaults her way to a suspenseful conclusion in a dazzling and troubling feminist page-turner." --Catherine Taylor, Financial Times (UK)

"Swallows is a compelling read, with characters that continually take you by surprise, and it's perceptive about class, money and gender politics." --Charlotte Heathcote, Mail on Sunday (UK)

"A compelling story that helps us process a mind-boggling world that's getting newer and braver with each passing year." --Hippo Press

"Kirino's novel reveals the ugly, awkward, frequently embarrassing thoughts we're too ashamed to say out loud, and the inner, anxious dialogue we often engage in with ourselves -- all of which make for great reading." --Washington Post

"Dispensing with thriller tropes, [Kirino] tells a grounded story of human commodification that proves a sobering indictment of consumerism in Japanese society. . . . Swallows, with its unforgiving world and heavy themes, ultimately proves a thoughtful meditation on the dehumanizing underbelly of capitalist society." --Asian Review of Books

"Kirino depicts flawed humanity across class, each character struggling to find meaning or money in the pursuit of a fresh start, or adhering to the status quo while literal new life steadily grows alongside the tangled plot. . . . There's an existential terror that seeps out between the lines: What else will we buy and sell in the future? Kirino seems to ask. The answer is more frightening than anything she's written so far." --The Japan Times

"Swallows trades in a quieter, bloodless apprehension. The novel is a theater of good intentions, where characters perform civility while coldly appraising one another's value and which assets they can extract for their own gain. Underneath everyone's tight smiles and white lies are sharp teeth, ready to be bared." --Washington Independent Review of Books

About the Author

NATSUO KIRINO, born in 1951, is one of the most popular literary writers in modern Japan. She won the Grand Prix for Crime Fiction in Japan for her 1998 novel Out, as well as one of Japan's major literary awards--the Naoki Prize--for Soft Cheeks (coming soon from Knopf) the following year. Several of her books have also been turned into feature movies. Out was the first of her novels to appear in English and was nominated for an Edgar Award. She lives in Japan.

LISA HOFMANN-KURODA is a literary translator. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she is the co-translator of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Kappa (New Directions, 2023), Yuko Tsushima's Wildcat Dome (FSG, 2025), Yoko Tawada's Exophony (New Directions, 2025) and Natsuo Kirino's Swallows (Knopf, 2025). She lives in New York City.