“The Swallows Don’t Return”: Kirino Natsuo’s Surrogacy Thriller

Kirino Natsuo’s novel Tsubame wa modotte konai (The Swallows Don’t Return) deals with surrogate pregnancy, where people who cannot have children themselves instead rely on another woman to give birth to a baby, which they then go on to raise. I finished reading, shocked at how the novel ended and at my abrupt release from its world.

Surrogacy has been carried out legally in some US states from the 1980s, and the market is constantly expanding. In 2022, the global market value was $14 billion, and it is forecast to grow to $129 billion in 2032. While the practice is illegal in Japan, an increasing number of Japanese people who want to have children via this method are traveling abroad.

Blurred Sympathies

In The Swallows Don’t Return, the Kusaokes have spent several years undergoing fertility treatment without success. As the wife Yūko is getting older and she has been told she will have difficulties carrying a pregnancy to full term, they ask an agent to arrange a surrogate pregnancy using the husband Motoki’s sperm and the surrogate mother’s eggs.

Both want a child with Japanese DNA, and therefore a Japanese surrogate mother—which is an expensive, illegal business.

Riki, who takes on the surrogacy role, has come to Tokyo from Hokkaidō. She is scraping by on ¥82,000 a month, working in a nonregular job, and sees the chance of getting paid ¥10 million as unmissable.

As well as Yūko and Riki, their friends and Yūko’s mother-in-law make various appearances, showcasing Kirino’s skill at depicting female characters, as they become involved in the slowly unfolding plot.

Rather than creating simplistic divisions between the haves and have-nots or those who can give birth and those who cannot, Kirino switches adeptly between various perspectives, and it becomes unclear who is the heroine and who the villain.

At one moment I felt sympathy for Riki and resentment against Yūko’s selfish words, remembering when I was younger; next, from a mother’s perspective, I took Yūko’s side, unable to forgive Riki for how self-centered she was. Before I knew it, I was immersed in the story, and desperate to know how it ended.

Complex Emotions

Kirino often puts women at the center of her raw, powerful stories, as with the factory workers in the murder thriller Out (trans. by Stephen Snyder) and Gurotesuku (trans. by Rebecca Copeland as Grotesque), which deals with the swirling emotions inside its female protagonist.

The novel feels so realistic because all of the characters are flawed and make readers aware of their own genuine feelings and negative emotions. This is what makes Kirino’s books so frightening, as she rips away the polite veneer we try to use to cover up these feelings.

In this book, Kirino skillfully conveys complex emotions through the dialogue—portraying values and conflict over marriage, pregnancy, and giving birth, as well as the intrinsic longing for wealth, the desperate need to escape poverty, and the sorrowful desire to be loved. These are thoughts any woman over a certain age is likely to have had, so it feels like a mirror is being held up to readers.

The story builds to a climax in which the surrogate mother Riki makes a fateful decision that is likely to split readers’ sympathies. This superb novel is thoroughly recommended.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner image courtesy Shūeisha.)