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?
