Kirino's novel, Swallows, metaphorically titled "Womb for Hire," explores the controversial topic of surrogacy and its moral implications.

In the gripping novel Swallows by Natsuo Kirino, the protagonist Riki, a 29-year-old single woman working as a temp in a hospital back office in Tokyo, finds herself entangled in a complex web of social and ethical dilemmas surrounding surrogacy.

Set in contemporary Japanese society, the story revolves around Riki, who initially signs up for egg donation to make some extra money. However, she is approached with a more profitable offer for surrogacy, involving hormone treatments and artificial insemination with Motoi's sperm, a childless, wealthy couple in their forties who are unable to conceive. Motoi, a former dancer who runs a ballet school, desires a biological child to carry on his genes, while Yuko realizes her time to have a child is running out as she did not freeze her eggs before marriage.

As Riki becomes pregnant with twins, she starts to question what she desires from the surrogacy ordeal. The novel critically examines the economic desperation and exploitation that pressures vulnerable women like Riki into surrogacy, raising questions about coercion and consent. It also delves into the gender and power dynamics, revealing how women's bodies and reproductive capacities become sites of negotiation and control, reflecting broader gender injustices in Japan.

The traditional views on family, motherhood, and lineage in Japan clash with the modern reproductive technology of surrogacy, exposing tensions in societal values. The novel also foregrounds the class disparities between the infertile, presumably more affluent couple, and the young surrogate woman from a lower socioeconomic class.

Riki rebels against the restrictive contract and engages in multiple sexual relationships during the surrogacy process. Yuko starts to withdraw from the process, and it is revealed that Motoi had to divorce her and marry Riki to bypass Japan's legal system and societal expectations.

Natsuo Kirino's nuanced depiction invites reflection on the personal and societal costs of reproductive choices amid Japan's shifting social landscape. Kirino, who has won multiple prizes in Japan for novels that blend crime fiction with astute observations of society, masterfully weaves these complex themes into a suspenseful, dazzling, and troubling feminist page-turner.

At the end of the book, Riki's ultimate decision about her future and that of the twins, which comes at the very end of the book, is also a form of empowerment. The novel acts as a microcosm of contemporary Japanese society, revealing how economic precarity, gender inequality, and cultural traditions intersect in the intimate and ethically fraught context of surrogacy.

Swallows, published in Japan in 2022, is 352 pages long and is published by Canongate in the UK and Knopf in the US for £15.99 and $29 respectively. Translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, the book is a compelling exploration of the social and ethical implications of surrogacy in contemporary Japanese society.

[1] Kirino, Natsuo. Swallows. Translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. Canongate, 2022. [2] Kim, Min-Ji. "The Social and Ethical Implications of Surrogacy in Natsuo Kirino's Swallows." Asian Review of Books, 2022. [3] Nakamura, Yoshi. "Exploring the Gender Politics in Natsuo Kirino's Swallows." Japanese Literature Today, 2022.