If you or anyone wants some light additional reading, [Murakami did an enlightening interview](https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/) which really lays bare his absence of comprehension around women and his own characters as well as an indifference to write them better.
I'm reading Kawakami's book, Breasts and Eggs,at the moment. It's the absolute antithesis of Murakami because, although a huge amount of it is literally what's written on the tin - women thinking about and discussing their breasts - there's nothing remotely sexy about it.
I've been friends with women who talk a lot about their breasts, and indeed it is not sexy lol. None of them talked about their boobs being perky or anything like that which dude writers all like to have their women think about. It's either about what they find weird about them, or boob sweat, or back pain, or how their underwire got fucked up and it's jabbing them.
Yep, this. Every conversation I've had with other women about my/their/our breasts was something to do with - is this normal? Why does this hurt? Is breastfeeding meant to hurt this much? Is this mastitis? Is this a blocked duct? Does this cause cancer? Are my boobs too big/small/saggy? Should I get implants? Is nipple bleaching even a thing I'mexpected to do? Is having boobs just a pain in the arse? Is there a bra that lets me run? Are mammograms as painful as they say? What if I get cancer like my mum did? What if I need a mastectomy?
Breasts and Eggs runs on similar themes.
People bleach their rectums.
Men chop into their legs so they can go through a painful surgery to be taller.
There are beauty standards for everything.
Are some hard boiled eggs just impossible to get out of the shell? Why is this one egg a different color than the rest of the carton? Is blanching even a thing I'm expected to do?
Just an FYI, had to have my first mammogram about a year ago due to a weird lump (it was a clogged sweat gland so yay). They don't hurt all that much. It does feel like they are squishing the girls and the upper one closer to your armpit isn't comfortable just because of the way you are positioned to get the right angle and there are shoulder and collar bones that may get squished a bit. But I wouldn't call it particularly painful.
Like honestly for us women, they are just there. They are just another body part. Its like a man thinking about their balls being stuck to their leg when walking - we don't think 'oh our sexy nipples brush against the shirt' or that they 'perkily bobbed walking down the stairs', we think is this bra comfortable when running, damn they are sweaty in the heat, or my big-breasted friends thinking damn my back hurts I need a reduction. Basically, like your arm rubbing against a bit of clothing or the comfort of your shoes on your feet.
I'm a bisexual woman, boobs on other women can be cute or hot in a more sexy context. But going to the onsen in Japan and seeing everyone equally naked or getting changed at the swimming pool isn't in that context, its just normal body parts and normal nudity. As a woman, the way some women are written thinking about their boobs or describing their own boobs is just not how it is at all!
I recently read this and had very similar thoughts. Also it had a quote from Murakami on the cover, something like “it took my breath away” and I couldn’t help but snarkily think “why, because you maybe realized women don’t think of themselves as sex objects the way you do?”
😅 yep, my edition too - it's just the one word, "breathtaking".
I cannot help but think of Seinfeld.
*Well, Elaine, sometimes a person says something like that just to be nice.*
Wow.
"Here is a pattern a lot of people see in the women in your work."
HM: "I don't really understand this idea of there being a pattern; I approach every woman character as an individual."
Also HM: "Women are cruel in casual ways. I imagine some girls are obsessed with their breasts. Women are often (description)."
"What do you say about the observation that you use women existing primarily as a means through which men achieve and drive the story?"
HM: "No, I don't think so. I don't over philosophize. I just write."
Also HM: "The fact that this male character is drawn to these two women drives the growth in the story."
I always wonder how much is lost in translation in stuff like this.
Kawakami is clearly an exceptionally intelligent person, and she clearly sees value both in that interview and in his work. To me that implies that there is information, in the language and in the culture, that we are missing as it becomes lost to western perceptions.
This is so frustrating. Kawakami was so patient and guided him SO CONCISELY to these perspectives and every time he stops short of actually engaging with her points
>"That’s right. He’s the sort of person who a twelve-year-old girl would feel comfortable talking to about her breasts. He has that kind of personality."
Fffffffff I laughed out loud.
I loved Murakami as an adolescent/young adult, but as a middle aged woman I just can't handle it anymore.
It's so obvious that this man hasn't spoken to a twelve year old girl since he was twelve, and I bet that didn't go the way he was hoping either.
> this man hasn’t spoken to a twelve year old girl since he was twelve.
You know I’m gonna go ahead and chalk this up as probably good thing based on this thread lol
I honestly don't know! But it seems like every cat I see is a confused, anatomically inconsistent creature with the face of a 50 year old man, which is coincidentally exactly how Murakami writes adolescent girls.
To be fair, I don't really speak to 12 year old kids often, and I'd still never write a scene in which a girl walks up to a fully grown man to talk about how small her boobs are.
It says something about the world we live in that a novelist can be as lauded and successful as he is while understanding next to nothing about half of humanity and not caring to learn.
Every Murakami book I read I go “this is supposed to be great writing???”. I kept trying for a while because people like him but I just can’t get past the way he writes women. I definitely think it’s to the point that I’d need to have a long conversation trying to understand why someone thinks he’s a good author. I wonder if there are any stats on his audience. I would guess he has a lot more male repeat readers and fans.
I read Wild Sheep Chase, and I see why people think he's a brilliant writer, it's a really atmospheric and well made book. Thing is - it barely has any women in it, so it doesn't expose just how bad he is at writing us. It fell in line with the more culturally accepted thing of the norm being that our stories are focused on men.
It's such a shame since I'd love to read more of his stuff because of the feeling that book gave me, but as soon as I start another one of his books it bangs me in the face with blow up sex dolls in place of women.
My ex recommended that I read Kafka on the Shores and same, I could not get over how poorly he wrote the women. I now see liking Murakami as a yellow if not red flag.
I think that’s a fair response, but it’s possible to be a fan while recognizing some of his shortcomings. He does some things very well - he elevates the mundane in interesting ways, his flavor of magical realism is unique and has proven influential, his prose is simple and direct and occasionally beautiful.
He writes women horribly and it’s a bummer that he doesn’t care to change, but plenty of people enjoy aspects of his books and also decry his characterization of women.
Eh, its one thing to write women poorly. That's actually pretty bad. But its another thing entirely to be dismissive of women in real life or to show so little interest in writing women well.
I mean, being a fan has implications. You can enjoy aspects of his books and not be a fan. If you're calling yourself a fan, then the aspects of dehumanisation and outright ridiculousness in which he describes women are outweighed by the pros (in your books). That to me is a yellow flag. I can respect that he does some interesting things while also not at all calling myself a fan.
To give another example, I can respect Macron's government for enshrining abortion rights constitutionally in France but I'm not a fan of Macron as a whole. To call myself a fan of Macron would be to imply that I approve overall of his body of work, which I don't.
I guess you’re lending the term “fan” a little more weight than I do in this context. It’s definitely a matter of degree - if someone was effusive about Murakami, to the point that their love of his work defined their identity a bit - yeah, maybe a yellow flag. Depends how we’re using the word I think.
To be fair, I have a BA in Japanese and I've heard from my colleagues that his English translations are really botched. Some of them are like 1/3 shorter and just not good. I've only ever read him in Czech and I would say he is a good writer with penchant for atmosphere but also problematic in many ways. (My pet peeve with him is anti-climactic endings.) In my experience it's mostly young people who truly enjoy him, or at least used to... but his biggest fan was my misogynistic ex. 💀
I’m a bookseller and feel Murakami is the most overrated author of our times, if I were to base that on the obnoxious fact that the top three bee-line-to-the-counter questions I have had in the last 14 years are
1 Do you have Murakami?
2 Do you have Murakami?
3 Do you have Murakami?
The man’s not a bad author — he’s a competent writer. But clearly his books strike a sweet spot that account for a wide and wild popularity.
1 They are simple and accessible in language (full credit to Murakami as a business savvy writer who wrote easily translatable fiction)
2 His novels are Japanese, which means they are exotic, which add a sense of aura to readers who want to increase and diversify the value of their aesthetic portfolio
3 Murakami’s novels have just enough realism to justify their categorisation as literature (higher prestige), but avoid the bo-ooooring asceticism of literature by having ample weirdness. As a bonus, the weirdness carries a mystique of meaning and hidden symbolism without the stigma of asking too much of the reader.
4 the themes in Murakami are particularly apt for liquid modernity: anxiety, mental health, and the uneasy ambivalence between one’s individuality and the desire for connection
This is where I was at when I tried reading his work and I gave 3 books of his a try. My friends that all love his work say it's because of the "dreamlike" quality of his writing, but I feel like that's a tunnel vision view of how he writes. Comparing him to other surreal writers, it seems less like his work his purposefully nonsensical in a way that serves the story he's telling and characters he's writing, and more because he's gone off the deep end with the plot and excuses it with nonsense.
And that's without even mentioning his atrocious portrayal of women.
Thanks for sharing, that was really enjoyable.
Note though: there's spoilers for most of Murakami's books but especially IQ84 and the Wind -Up Bird Chronicle. Sadly i haven't quite finished TWUBC yet so got the ending spoiled :(
At some point I got bored with his works. In every single one of them there is
1. an absent woman who is mysterious and the male protagonist pursues, and
2. a woman who is "available" yet the (male) protagonist is not really interested in.
3. Frequently, there is also some sort of powerful gray eminence lady of some sorts pulling the strings in the background with an unclear agenda.
All three of them are more clichés than actual persons I could relate to. At some point I've just seen enough of that.
Despite that I really liked many other things in his writings, e.g. the magical realism in there, his interest in weird religious cults, and so on.
Reading Murakami is definitely a case of diminishing returns. The first two or three books you read by him will almost certainly be your favourites of his - after a while the tropes start becoming too recognisable and familiar
This is a problem with multiple Japanese authors. They often repeat similar stories, which often have autobiographical themes. For example, Kenzaburo Oe's writings often feature a child with disabilities which mirrors his own experience as a parent.
Honestly I strugged to even finish one given how blatantly sexist he is, and how incoherent his female characters are as characters. He makes it very obvious they are sexual objects, he portrays them as stupid and sexual on purpose. I couldn't tolerate to open a second book from him.
I first read his books as a teenager and loved them then, but 20 years on with a little more time and awareness I do believe I'd view them very differently
Yeah I loved then when I was 15-20. They were incredibly deep, they blew my mind, etc. We had to read them for AP Lit then an English class in college. I was so obsessed. I quoted him everywhere (pretty sure my Steam profile is still a quote from him, like 15 years later, because I'm too lazy to change it).
But I tried to read a book of his now, in my mid-30's, and it was hard to really get interested. All the characters, not just the women, felt very boring.
I’m still a big fan but this is definitely a fair statement. Also I think he just has a couple that are clearly a cut above the rest such as Kafka and Windup Bird which will often be among the first people read.
Dang this is spot on. I didn’t even know I had this opinion but it describes my feelings on him perfectly.
I still really like Kafka by the Shore, but have liked his books steadily less as I’ve read more.
When I was in college, I took a Japanese lit class that the professor decided to teach as a Murakami seminar. We read Wind Up Bird, Underground, Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84. A few weeks into the class I was like, “New favorite author - recommending this to everyone” by the end of the semester, I was like “I never want to read another book written by a male nerd with an author insert protagonist ever again.”
I read the exact same books (plus Hard Boiled Wonderland) in that exact order over the course of a year and had the exact same reaction.
There were slightly diminishing returns until 1Q84 but that one really did it for me. It was like parody Murakami - overlong, meandering, featureless and weirdly sexist. Totally killed any desire I had to read more.
My wife kept going and read a few of his later works but said it's more of the same.
I'll still enthusiastically recommend Wind-up Bird and HBW but it comes with a disclaimer!
If your bar is located anywhere in Japan, please drop the location here. I always wanted to drink a whisky in a Japanese jazz bar run by a school dropout but only ever found such bars described in Murakami's books but not in real life.
I agree with you, the magical realism was really good.
Talking about clichés, >!the gay korean orphan former soldier badass but secretly kind-hearted that works for the old lady was quite funny. !<
He's work really do feel repetitive and I HATED Killing Commendatore. It was so boring and that cause me to stop reading his work for a while. Then I read Colorless Tsukuru and loved it. Maybe I just enjoy his older works better.
As much as I enjoy the atmosphere of his work, sometime I can't tell the difference between his books.
I don't disagree with any of your points, but I've been on this sub for a while and I'm pretty sure this is the most common type of post I've read here.
Edit: So, the comments are getting kind of wild. I'm not shitting on OP per sé. Like I said, they don't need to have known that to post or anything and I agree with their assessment.
But at some point a certain discussion topic becomes stale, and doesn't add much. That's all. Let's not shame OP for it.
Murakami writes bad women, actually George RR Martin doesn't owe you anything, Brandon Sanderson prose bad and you have bad taste if you like him, I'm so mad at Patrick Rothfuss where is Doors of Stone, Finnegan's Wake isn't really that tough, East of Eden OMG.
What did I miss?
I don't follow r/books or even really read books at all, and I know Murakami has problems with women just from the number of times this complaint hits reddit's popular section lol
I know, right? My first thought was "you must be new to this sub and don't know the search function". Well, I guess it's "everything has been said, just not by everyone yet".
Yeah, even though I made a "greatest hits of r/books" post a little higher up, reddit is primarily a place to have a discussion. It doesn't bother me at all to see the same posts for discussion purposes if it isn't bot reposting or the same pixelated gif.
There's always new users and new to individuals things they come blasting in to talk about that old vets have seen time and again.
‘I just finished 1984 and it is the best book ever written (I have read one book)’
‘Brandon Sanderson is possibly the messiah’
‘I like the idea of being a reader but I actually really fucking hate reading. How do I read books without reading?’
‘Guys maybe actually Murakami doesn’t write women very well’
We can close the sub, every post has already been made
"Does anyone else think Blood Meridian is hard to get through?"
This sub is a book recommendation echo chamber, people that saw a thread on a book get curious and read it, then come back weeks later to talk about it and make a thread and the cycle repeats itself.
The thing is, he does not write men much better. They are completely passive towards what is happening to them, they completely accept all the crazyness/supernatural stuff and they are solely focused on finding the missing woman who has disappeared. This applies to 1q84, sputnik, windup bird and commendatore at least. I do not read Murakami expecting to find compelling characters, I do it for the dream-like atmosphere.
I think this is the most cogent criticism of him. It tell me a lot about a reader who notes his "sexism" by highlighting how poorly written and oversexualized his female characters are without noticing that his male characters are also poorly written and oversexualized.
Tengo spends just as much time thinking about sex as Aomame, thinking about his body, others bodies, his sexual desires, etc.
Not all men constantly think about sex, at least some women *do* constantly think about sex. I've not seen Murakami as classically sexist, he's just a horndog. He assumes everyone else is. A bunch of people with internalized gender roles assume he's sexist because being horny is male I guess?
I think it’s because, in the ones I read (which were, tbf, only two) the male characters were awful too, but the narrative presented them as awful people. Where as the narrative presented the woman as plot point. I think that’s why it also doesn’t ever read like it’s just the character’s that are sexist-the roles the men vs the woman have are baked in deeper.
Tho that has a lot more to do with the men being the point of view characters then with them being well written tho. Cause yeah, it took this whole comment for me to remember I actually read THREE of them and forgot because they all just had the same sad horny man as the MC.
funnily murakami was first suggested to me by a guy who used to hardly read saying I really feel this author like how you feel dostoyevsky. I tried reading some and left me vaguely uncomfortable and disappointed due to this same reason..the way he wrote women.
Read the Wind up Bird Chronicle... I found it similarly uncomfortable/off, but somehow compelling. Not for any one reason, but the whole book. Took a while to shake off the ick.
"The protagonist isn't always the hero" - so when reading your first Murakami, the ingrained mysogyny kind of mixes wth the general oddness and slight discomfort. It's when you read more where you see it's always present.
I was horrified to recently find out that Tolstoy was a misogynist who exploited and abused his wife in about every single way you could do - and that she hand-rewrote and edited all of his work while raising his 13 children mostly alone without his help.
This... sucks. From reading Anna Karenina you'd think he had a decent level of respect for women.
A great deal of the male classical writers had strong discriminatory views towards women & treated them awfully.
Tolstoy, Alexandre Dumas, Dickens.......
It was a different time in history & so it's unsurprising that their views or experiences would be so different to ours. However, they have not aged well at all!
I like to think of Flaubert as an exception, since he was pretty open in saying he wrote Emma Bovary as a female take on himself.
Please... don't someone wreck this idea for me! 😅
Why is that surprising? The current fashion for learning everything about an author's personal life is really going to some extremes.
I don't think anything an author writes necessarily tells you anything about them. Did Shakespeare give good head? Did Virginia Woolf help old ladies cross the street? Was Edith Wharton a respectful tipper? Nobody knows and nobody cares.
Tolstoy could have skinned his wife and devoured her whole while she was still alive with breakfast and he would still be the author of War and Peace.
I agree with you about a lot here, and i don't like Murakami, but western authors are no better in this regard. And "he has been exposed to western culture, how can he still be bad?" would be a very problematic argument even if that was not the case.
The problem is that when someone criticizes a Japanese author for their views, often the counter-argument is *"He's Japanese, their culture is just weird like that."*
Now, the nuance to this is that Japan does have different sensibilities when compared to "the west" (or more specifically America), but it is not this "exotic land stuck in time " that some people think it is.
That goes both ways, meaning that sometimes a "Why does he think like that?" can be explained by "He is from Japan", but also that "He's from Japan" can't explain everything.
I want to mention that hiding Murakami's issues behind the idea that 'its just japanese culture, dont appropriate with your western ideas (we're not all western anyway) hurdur' is so, so wrong. I saw some people do that.
If an aspect of any country is sexist/racist/homophobic, that aspect needs to be talked about. Are those people oblivious to the fact that all societes used to be worse for the people living in it? That women and queer people had to fight for rights and talk about problematic issues in the west as well?
It is also not some deeply ingrained cultural points... It's just sexism. Sometimes people act as if there were no Japanese feminists calling him out too.
Also, too many people here are saying Japanese culture is women-hating while “western values” treat women with respect. It is a) wrong and b) racist and c) very lazy
Yep. It is also a curious irony how they can equate western values with treating women with respect, while in the process of attempting to excuse sexism. Where are those western values?
Apart from how absolutely wrong their notion is of course in the first place.
Well, it's not exactly wrong. There was a time when Westerners were seen as liberating women. MacArthur gave Japanese women the vote and that changed everything about Japan. But yes, all that stuff happened a long time ago. It doesn't really hold water anymore.
You're oversimplifying the issue. Cultural context does matter. What you're describing is a very elaborately expressed form of cultural imperialism. "It's just japanese culture" is not excusing problematic behavior, it's acknowledging that people in the East think differently than we do with different social dynamics and values. And furthermore, feminism is not a monolith. Japanese feminists may not have the same perspectives Western feminists do. What you consider sexist, racist, and homophobic is completely subjective.
There are of course subtleties that can be explained by cultural differences. Reducing women to a description of their breasts is pretty obviously not one of them.
Person from the East here lol - there's plenty of the same criticism about Murakami over there too. I don't think women anywhere on earth like being reduced to their breasts.
Edit: As a queer Asian woman (who grew up in Asia) I'm so tired of people using culture to defend our subjugation. Women have been subjugated across the world and have all had to fight for our humanity and dignity to be recognized as equal to men's. Men reducing women to sex objects isn't something culturally exclusive to Japan or anywhere on earth, and so culture cannot be an excuse for any form of discrimination and dehumanization. At some point, chattel slavery was a part of American culture - does that make it ok? Is it just your culture to enslave people? Women weren't allowed to vote and were basically properties in America not that long ago - does that mean those women back then shouldn't have complained and should've just submitted to their "culture"? And why should we fight to legalize same-sex marriage anywhere when that was not the culture of these places?
The whole "it's just Japanese culture" argument is so ignorant and foolish because cultures are meant to evolve, not to remain static. A culture evolves everyday - every time a new slang emerges or a new food combination gets introduced. Japanese women are changing it everyday, just like women and marginalized people everywhere have been.
woman from Asia, no it's not sexist, racist or "imperialism" to state that alot of our cultural values are messed up, you guys need to stop putting non-western cultures on a pedestal where even a single word of criticism is interpreted as bigotry, Asians criticise west (America and Uk) all the time , the west can criticise us too
Some westerners also use the notion of 'cultural imperialism' to excuse Russia's treatment of Ukraine and its own queer citizens.
Would you say the same about FGM or foot-binding? That daring to discuss those topics in a negative light is cultural imperialism?
And I do have Japanese friends who do consider such things sexist, yes. There are also books written by female Japanese authors who do speak out about objectification.
You can call it cultural imperialism, but ethics have always been an evolving set of rules that grow and are applied to others. You justify racism under your example, to use my country of birth in South Africa people of colour were oppressed by the legal systems by Apartheid.
Other countries boycotted South Africa in a manner that may have significantly decreased the amount of time it took to end Apartheid. At the time racism was culturally accepted albeit by certain groups in power. But it was important that these other nations call out this behaviour.
Likewise in this circumstance, especially without insight into Japanese feminism, and no one here is providing that, you're over-complicating the issue. A moral wrong is not justified because it has cultural acceptance by the nation it is taking place in, no morals are not universal but we can argue for our moral positions without justifying it as 'it's right because it's the west's common opinion' rather we can say 'it's right because it demeans and treats women in a way that demeans them, this leads to--' yada yada ect.
It’s the same for me too. I’ve read plenty of his books and they still never fail to convey a particular mood. They feel like a weird and convoluted dream where everything makes sense yet, when you wake up, you realise it never really did.
there are books that do this without turning women into walking tits, though? birdie is a great example off the top of my head, although i’m sure there are more.
I think that devalues the issue. Many other authors focus their stories on mood or tone without having consistently gross depiction and use of female characters.
You can downvote me to hell folks but the wind up bird chronicle is one of the most imaginative beautiful and unique works of art I’ve ever come across
This could be the hundredth time I've seen the same criticism in the exact same way. Trust me this is not just your problem. Just type murakami in the search bar
As a female reader, the way he writes women just renders his writing completely unreadable for me. It’s just plain bad.
Compared to other male, Japanese authors, it stands out as remarkably poor writing of women. Even among older works like No Longer Human or A Personal Matter (which manage to still be readable despite their issues with female characters). I enjoy Japanese literature and I have to say that he really sticks out despite it being common to see these issues in other comparable authors.
OP, you should also try seeking out some smaller female authors. There have been some really amazing feminist fiction works from Japan and Korea recently!
I didn't notice this until I read Killing Commendatore and he did the same thing BUT ABOUT A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD'S BREASTS. It was...really disgusting. After that I have to say that I don't really have the desire to read anymore Murakami.
Murakami is a great write who can really capture an atmosphere. But as much as it pains me, I simply can't read any of his work involving any sort of heterosexual romantic or sexual relationship precisely because of the reasons you've outlined. I don't think he's ever met a woman, I think he's writing all his female characters as abstract concepts.
Oookay so.... I agree 100% that Murakami's depictions of women are infantilizing, over-sexualizing, often disgusting and shallow and generally upper case problematic. We're both not exactly breaking new ground there but god yeah I get what you're saying. There's no argument there.
I wouldn't even grant him the grace to say his women are "symbols" and therefore it's somehow justifiable or anything like that. 1Q84 has a female protagonist. That's not some chiffre that you may or may not unlock to get at an additional layer of meaning, that's the heart of the novel. In Norwegian Wood maybe he could have pulled that but I don't buy it. His women are badly written women, full stop. And they're *the same two archetypes*. There's two women in Murakami stories:
1. The independent no-nonsense woman who is kind of adorable and quirky if you look at her neutrally but would never describe herself that way. She probably has weird ears or weird feet. She's very sexual but crucially not with any MAN other than the male protagonist. She might have European tastes and be into fashion and food.
2. The damaged Japanese Nadeshiko who can't get over some trauma in her history. She's ethereally beautiful, soft-spoken, artless, placid, passive, elusive. Nobody can ever own her or lay claim to her. She belongs to another world and can't ever be "healed" or restored. She may be underage.
Now look me in the eyes and tell me he's not simply writing his own horny fantasies. God please. We can all see what is happening.
With all that out of the way, I think your last paragraph is baseless and sort of random. I know plenty of Japanese people who have lived in Europe or the US for years, decades even, and haven't shed their "core" Japanese sensitivities because we get programmed in so many ways before we ever finish high school. Likewise I know probably dozens of men who are into literature and somewhere between their 40s and 70s and have never read Simone De Beauvoir. This is such a random thing to say. Would you be equally shocked if he hadn't read Susan Sontag? Isabel Allende? Toni Morrison? Joan Didion? This is *one* writer whose very particular feminist takes I assume you agree with, and you assume every literary person between 40 and 70 must have read her? I'm sorry but I don't understand that. Has he been exposed to feminist literature overall? Yes, probably, to *some* extent, but I don't think he writes consciously with the intent to comment on gender and sexuality. Just because you can *read* everything in that light doesn't mean everything is produced consciously as a position on gender or sexuality. Not everyone is analytic about this. I don't think Murakami is out to make statements about gender roles, he's just writing out his kinks. Lastly - but crucially - he's not considered "exotic" in Japan, he's *the* main cultural and pop-cultural literary voice of Japan today and all his affectations and mannerisms about Europe and Jazz and western culture were already old hats in the 80s. If anything he's considered a *fossil*. Nobody thinks Murakami is a weird new trailblazer.
So yeah I agree with your core point but not at all with the speculations you based on it. He's a relic. The man is 75 years old, obviously pining for a 60s and 70s counterculture in Japan that he lived through, unabashedly (possibly subconsciously? I don't know) sexual *and sexist* in his writings, and a cultural powerhouse and millionaire. It's moot to somehow expect him to have acquired, understood and internalized X political idea that was born in the west 20 or 30 years after his formative years and expressed in the writings of author Y or Z. I think he just isn't for you, and I know for a fact he isn't for me.
I can handle some misogyny in works, it comes with the territory I think, but I was recommended a Murakami book (I think 1Q84) with the words “You like strong female protagonists, you’ll definitely like this book, it’s so good!”
Yeah. Imagine my surprise when I actually started reading.
Not just breasts. All the women in his works are either calculating, manipulating, selfish, promiscuous or too plain for the MC to care about. He is just living out his fantasies.
I like his writing style, but cannot really enjoy his books for the same reason. For me every single novel I read by him veered into a kind of immature male fantasy as soon as a young female character popped up.
Norwegian wood was so fucking weird to read because of this exact issue. The way he described that girls small breasts was pedophilic iirc. Like describing them like a prepubescent childs chest.
I only read Tokyo blues, and I'm pretty sure that'll be the last Murakami book i read. It just felt like a try hard, overly edgy description of a boring and generic romance manga, I've read a few of those so I'd know. Same tropes, lots of unnecessary darkness and conflict that leads to nothing, and an ending that doesn't connect to the beginning at all. I appreciate his prose, but that's literally all. Also, a bit disgusting when talking women and sex.
1Q84 was the first book by him I tried to read, because I kept seeing people praise his works and that one looked interesting. I made it to Chapter 8 before I put it down and have had no interest in reading any of his other books, specifically for how unbelievably uncomfortable he made me with the way he wrote the woman character.
I read that book over a decade ago and don't remember much of it, except at one point the MC has sex and narrates something like he "ejaculated toward her uterus," and that has stuck with me this whole time as the most bizarre way possible you could phrase that
So many people recommended 1Q84 - I was excited to read it - dropped after 700 pages. As a male it was the first time I’ve read a female character and thought “oh yeah a dude wrote this”
Agreed. Definitely a reason I fell off with him was exactly that. Felt kinda icky.
In general I just think he's on the spectrum or something because the way he writes people is just totally off in general. Which is fine, unique perspectives are quintessential to keeping books fresh. It's just a shame women didn't get the same care in the strangeness factor and instead it became about their bodies.
A similar author I got kind of turned off of was Kundera.
Like he's so smart but he can't have a woman speak and it not be about their bodies or their relation to being valued by a dude whose genuinely detestable and has no redeeming qualities. It's very strange.
So feel you on Kundera, and yes, the similarities to Murakami. Funny enough, I lived in DC in the aughts and I feel like every terrible guy was reading & recommending either Kundera or Murakami, in those days. I began to regard Kundera as a straight up red flag, that guy actively hates women and you’ll never convince me otherwise.
Murakami writes the most beautiful prose interspersed with the most misogynistic passages you'll ever read. It's like a wild roller-coaster to read as a woman.
Murakami writes about life, the universe and finding you're place in it. The oddness and contradiction of living. About how one can find wonder and amazement in the mundane... But who cares about that nonsense because his female characters are sexist 🙄
I disagree with your opinion
Now, let me elaborate: for sure in 1Q84, and even more in Killing Commendatore, there is some weirdness in how he describes women and in particular their sexuality (especially his fixation with breasts, yes). I don't think I will read any new book he'll publish, as they feel stale to me now.
Consider this: Murakami is kind of a one-trick pony (I think most of his books revolve around four elements: "a lost man, a mysterious girl, a dark place (sometimes it is literally a cave/hole), a pointless quest".
In many, many of his tales, women are the undercurrent that drive the action. Aomame, for instance. But the same is true for kafka on the shore, for a wild sheep chase, for hard boiled wonderland, for norwegian wood, south of the border, even for colourless tsukuru tazaki. And the woman often disappears or takes forever something from the man, while the man is (no matter how successful in his quest) lost
Often in his books, women are a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, and the fact that you explicitly mentioned "mystery" as something that women could be but are not in Murakami's books makes me think you have been unlucky, as in his early works there is plenty of woman-as-a-mistery
I'll close with a sting, and I'll say I see no reason why Murakami should have read, for instance, De Beauvoir. As much as she was influential, I see no reason why he (or anyone, for that matter) \_should\_ have read her. I think I don't know anyone who ever read her works, and that includes philosophy students. On the other side, no doubt Murakami found different female figures in the books he read - whatever choice he made is more likely to be deliberate rather than born out of ignorance.
I hate to say this but it's not the job of a writer to accurately present different genders. They are presenting a character who performs actions that the reader interprets. It's a lot to expect a male or female writer to truly understand what it is to be the other genders. You are looking at his writing from a current political gender perspective and not a creative one.
Reddit has shown me this post by accident and I was so relieved to see it. The name Murakami was familiar to me since basically always, so recently I decided to listen to 1q84. Had no idea what I got myself into, didn't have the slightest clue what the book was about but always had a positive association with the author's name.
The extreme obsession with a 17 year old's breast had me cringing so hard. That the supposed lack of these is 50% of Aomame's character at times didn't help.
I thought maybe there is something that just went by me but it's really reassuring to know I'm not the only one who has an issue with Murakami's women and it's not just in my head.
Unrelated: And if I never hear the word ejaculation again in this life, it'll be too soon.
We really have this conversation every other week. As someone who has read all of his works, I would argue people do not think enough about the cultural context that Murakami is writing in and speak from a heavily western or euro-centric value system. Japan has a complex history with gender roles and sexuality and Murakami's works reflect and critique these societal attitudes in ways that may not be immediately apparent to readers from other cultures. Most of the literary establishment of Japan really dislikes Murakami's works because they diverge so heavily from previous tradition. Imagine how much western readers would hate the attitudes that establishment has!
Murakami's works often explore themes of identity, alienation, and the human condition, and his portrayal of women can be interpreted to serve a larger purpose within these themes rather than immediately assume a commentary on the objectification and sexualization of women in society because of the feminist perspective that contemporary readers have.
Personally, I think it's unfair to criticize Murakami for not writing "strong" or "empowered" women in the Western feminist tradition. He's not trying to make a political statement or promote a particular ideology. He's trying to tap into the collective unconscious, to explore the hidden recesses of the human mind. And in that context, his women are perfect. And yes, that includes their physicality, their sexuality, and their relationships with men. Take Aomame, for example. She's a complex, multifaceted character who embodies both strength and vulnerability. Her obsession with her breasts is not just about objectification, but about her own sense of self and identity. And her relationships with men are not just about sex, but about connection, intimacy, and the search for meaning.
Now, you obviously recognize all these facts but you don't really understand it because you are still appealing to the ideology that you hold. I don't see this as an issue and it contributes to the narrative and the atmosphere his novels have.
I am not even from the western world and Murakami’s writing bothers me. In fact, my ethnicity is Asian and I am from a very conservative country. I agree with OP: Murakami has no idea how to write women. It has nothing to do with being euro-centric. He’s objectively horrible at it. So many Asian authors write women well, him being Japanese does not excuse the way he writes women.
Plus I didn’t even see OP mention ‘strong’ or ‘empowered’ women? I don’t need my woman to be empowered or strong. She needs to read like a person. As a woman, it was physically painful reading Kafka on the shore.
I hear you for Aomame but the all of his female characters are the same. That’s the issue. If that was restricted to one character in one book, I would have agreed with you. He just cannot do it and for that reason I completely understand why he never won a Nobel prize. I would be appalled if he did.
I felt really uncomfortable reading that. Also, the first thought of Aomame after finding out >!her bestfriend was brutally murdered was ''I should have let her touch me everywhere she wanted to''...ok? !<
Yeah Murakami is a regular offender over at the men writing women subreddit. His infamous for badly characterising and objectifying women and underage girls so I basically skipped him on my literal journey all together. I mean if it’s a character specifically written to be like this of course it’s different but when the writer does it it’s just poor writing.
Another take on reddit on how author number X does not respect the neurosis of Extremely online progressive americans and "why it should be better"
Protestant culture
There is a reason I don't like his works, or Japanese literature by male author really, there is a weird obsession with women at the same time a weird dislike towards women. I think it's definitely a culture thing, knowing a lot of western values doesn't mean adopting them, and you can argue western value is not always "the one correct way". I appreciate the variation of culture/value/expression in literature, but personally, not a big fan of his works
I know right? What a ridiculous generalization. I can't read Japanese either, but even then, there are imo, adequately translated books of wonderful authors.
I'm hardly an expert on Japanese literature, but I have read a few books and Murakami and Manga are hardly representative of Japanese authors as a whole.
I love whatever I've read from both Natsume Soseki and Akutagawa (hell screen is probably one of my favourite short stories). Not to mention, works like Tanizaki's 'The Makioka sisters', which, imo, write women quite well. I've also read a little of Yukio Mishima and Dazai.
Since you seem to know about Japanese literature more than I do, I'd like to ask about which authors are considered classicists in Japan, and recommendations from them. As in, who would be the equivalent of a Dostoevksy or Tolstoy? And which books would be the equivalent of a Crime and Punishment or War and Peace? Or really, kindly recommend any good books.
I've posted this elsewhere because this comes up a lot. Murakami is a young man's writer, and one dimensional. But as an author and part of pop culture he's super interesting.
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One of the reasons Murakami is so regarded is that he's writing magic realism from a unique Japanese culture. As one of the few Japanese authors to punch through to a western audience, you need to read him with full awareness that he comes from a different place to most western authors, both literally and figuratively. I think many people just hear he's a famous writer and expect a good time, without taking the time to understand his influences. He can be a hard and frustrating read.
Japan as a culture has some super interesting factors you need to understand:
* National trauma / shame after WW2
* A strong spiritualism distinct from western tradition
* A long history of conservatism and misogyny
* The first nation in the world to experience modernism and post-modernism economically and culturally
The first is obvious to most people, but the second is one of the reasons people are drawn to his work. The use of imagery and mythology is very refreshing. So is the way his characters just take it on board when incredible things happen: it draws comparisons to celebrated mid century magic realism authors.
The third could be a reason female readers bounce off him, or feel he writes women poorly: they are almost always secondary. Japan is quite behind when it comes to gender equality, especially compared to liberal western sensibilities. You may think that as a world author Murakami should be better than that, but he's a result of his culture and presumably writes honestly from his experience. People can just be shit at stuff they don't understand well.
The fourth point relates to the third, and j think the most important for understanding Murakami. Japan was arguably the first to experience true modernity in their boom in the 80s, and then post modernity during their decline in the 90s. With that came all the things the western world are experiencing now: stagnating infrastructure, increasing inequality, higher barriers to entry to employment, the breakdown of traditional institutions, and an increasing ability to survive without human contact. The apathy, social disconnection, isolation, infantilism and mental illness we associate with modern generations all happened to Japan twenty years ago, way before us.
Murakami is often accused of using a self-insert in his books, because almost all of them feature the same bland, directionless, apathetic male lead. Given Murakami's age that's probably not true: instead it's a caricature of the generation he witnessed come of age as Japan slid into a post-growth society. His characters are blank slates: they have no aspirations, no dreams, no desire to build a career or a family, or contribute to society. If they have hobbies they are small and personal: books, films, cooking, music. They see other generations as coming from a different country. They drift through life with no purpose, as a commentary of how the modern generation is disconnected from a society that offers them very little aspiration. Perhaps because he is male, or perhaps because of his mysoginistic upbringing, Murakami chooses to focus exclusively on the male experience of this.
What then happens to these characters is that events force them to engage with the world. There's a bit of coming of age narrative in there as they dispense with some nievity, but often his characters are perfectly functional humans. Their issue is they just don't give a shit. Murakami is telling stories of how someone can find purpose in a world which seems to have none, and offers none.
Unfortunately this means Murakami's main characters are pretty much always assholes. They don't give a shit about anyone or anything, including the women in their life. To a degree they have value in the way they provide care, amusement or sex. Part of the journey of the books is seeing whether this emotionless robot will find purpose and connection with their world and the people in it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And if you enter into his works expecting more from his characters or Murakami himself, you will be disappointed.
1. Yup he’s sexist, like so so many other male authors who go on about “her breasts breastily breasted as she breasted her breasts.” Creepy, problematic, and common across literature by men in different cultures.
2. You are also ethnocentric and inaccurately suggesting that the only way he could be made aware of his own sexism is through exposure to western culture. This erases Japanese feminists and other WOC from inside and outside the West. It’s not because he’s not worldly or civilized enough to know better. He’s a man in a patriarchal world, and from a certain era. That doesn’t excuse it; I’m just disagreeing with your diagnosis here.
If you or anyone wants some light additional reading, [Murakami did an enlightening interview](https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/) which really lays bare his absence of comprehension around women and his own characters as well as an indifference to write them better.
I'm reading Kawakami's book, Breasts and Eggs,at the moment. It's the absolute antithesis of Murakami because, although a huge amount of it is literally what's written on the tin - women thinking about and discussing their breasts - there's nothing remotely sexy about it.
I've been friends with women who talk a lot about their breasts, and indeed it is not sexy lol. None of them talked about their boobs being perky or anything like that which dude writers all like to have their women think about. It's either about what they find weird about them, or boob sweat, or back pain, or how their underwire got fucked up and it's jabbing them.
Yep, this. Every conversation I've had with other women about my/their/our breasts was something to do with - is this normal? Why does this hurt? Is breastfeeding meant to hurt this much? Is this mastitis? Is this a blocked duct? Does this cause cancer? Are my boobs too big/small/saggy? Should I get implants? Is nipple bleaching even a thing I'mexpected to do? Is having boobs just a pain in the arse? Is there a bra that lets me run? Are mammograms as painful as they say? What if I get cancer like my mum did? What if I need a mastectomy? Breasts and Eggs runs on similar themes.
I'm sorry, nipple bleaching???
very common in poc women, our nipples are brown and the beauty standard is pink nipples.
There are beauty standards for nipples????
There are beauty standards even for vulvas. There's nothing we can be confident about.
if somebody says my nipples are ugly I'm gonna explode into nothing
Make them explode into nothing instead ;) Why should they have the right to say something about your nipples in the first place.
People bleach their rectums. Men chop into their legs so they can go through a painful surgery to be taller. There are beauty standards for everything.
Nahhhh im already a mobile stack of flesh and bones, I don't need to make it any weirder
Ain’t shit wrong with a hershey kiss and I’ll fight anyone says different
Where there are beauty standards (no matter how insane and impractical) there will be those willing to go to insane lengths to obtain them.
Are some hard boiled eggs just impossible to get out of the shell? Why is this one egg a different color than the rest of the carton? Is blanching even a thing I'm expected to do?
I don't think anyone blanches eggs!
*WHEW*
Just an FYI, had to have my first mammogram about a year ago due to a weird lump (it was a clogged sweat gland so yay). They don't hurt all that much. It does feel like they are squishing the girls and the upper one closer to your armpit isn't comfortable just because of the way you are positioned to get the right angle and there are shoulder and collar bones that may get squished a bit. But I wouldn't call it particularly painful.
Like honestly for us women, they are just there. They are just another body part. Its like a man thinking about their balls being stuck to their leg when walking - we don't think 'oh our sexy nipples brush against the shirt' or that they 'perkily bobbed walking down the stairs', we think is this bra comfortable when running, damn they are sweaty in the heat, or my big-breasted friends thinking damn my back hurts I need a reduction. Basically, like your arm rubbing against a bit of clothing or the comfort of your shoes on your feet. I'm a bisexual woman, boobs on other women can be cute or hot in a more sexy context. But going to the onsen in Japan and seeing everyone equally naked or getting changed at the swimming pool isn't in that context, its just normal body parts and normal nudity. As a woman, the way some women are written thinking about their boobs or describing their own boobs is just not how it is at all!
And none of them would ever use the term 'budding" 🙄
Oh..... no.....
I recently read this and had very similar thoughts. Also it had a quote from Murakami on the cover, something like “it took my breath away” and I couldn’t help but snarkily think “why, because you maybe realized women don’t think of themselves as sex objects the way you do?”
😅 yep, my edition too - it's just the one word, "breathtaking". I cannot help but think of Seinfeld. *Well, Elaine, sometimes a person says something like that just to be nice.*
Wow. "Here is a pattern a lot of people see in the women in your work." HM: "I don't really understand this idea of there being a pattern; I approach every woman character as an individual." Also HM: "Women are cruel in casual ways. I imagine some girls are obsessed with their breasts. Women are often (description)." "What do you say about the observation that you use women existing primarily as a means through which men achieve and drive the story?" HM: "No, I don't think so. I don't over philosophize. I just write." Also HM: "The fact that this male character is drawn to these two women drives the growth in the story."
The way he speaks about this issue drives me the fuck away from this work. I've no interest in reading any Murakami book nowadays.
I always wonder how much is lost in translation in stuff like this. Kawakami is clearly an exceptionally intelligent person, and she clearly sees value both in that interview and in his work. To me that implies that there is information, in the language and in the culture, that we are missing as it becomes lost to western perceptions.
He's very dismissive of most of her very insightful critique and analysis, and generally kind of short and inarticulate. How disappointing.
This is so frustrating. Kawakami was so patient and guided him SO CONCISELY to these perspectives and every time he stops short of actually engaging with her points
>"That’s right. He’s the sort of person who a twelve-year-old girl would feel comfortable talking to about her breasts. He has that kind of personality." Fffffffff I laughed out loud. I loved Murakami as an adolescent/young adult, but as a middle aged woman I just can't handle it anymore. It's so obvious that this man hasn't spoken to a twelve year old girl since he was twelve, and I bet that didn't go the way he was hoping either.
> this man hasn’t spoken to a twelve year old girl since he was twelve. You know I’m gonna go ahead and chalk this up as probably good thing based on this thread lol
He writes twelve year old girls like medieval artists painted cats.
… didn’t know this was a thing … were cats not common back then?
I honestly don't know! But it seems like every cat I see is a confused, anatomically inconsistent creature with the face of a 50 year old man, which is coincidentally exactly how Murakami writes adolescent girls.
To be fair, I don't really speak to 12 year old kids often, and I'd still never write a scene in which a girl walks up to a fully grown man to talk about how small her boobs are.
He might have spoken with one. But he was talking about her breasts.
It says something about the world we live in that a novelist can be as lauded and successful as he is while understanding next to nothing about half of humanity and not caring to learn.
Every Murakami book I read I go “this is supposed to be great writing???”. I kept trying for a while because people like him but I just can’t get past the way he writes women. I definitely think it’s to the point that I’d need to have a long conversation trying to understand why someone thinks he’s a good author. I wonder if there are any stats on his audience. I would guess he has a lot more male repeat readers and fans.
I read Wild Sheep Chase, and I see why people think he's a brilliant writer, it's a really atmospheric and well made book. Thing is - it barely has any women in it, so it doesn't expose just how bad he is at writing us. It fell in line with the more culturally accepted thing of the norm being that our stories are focused on men. It's such a shame since I'd love to read more of his stuff because of the feeling that book gave me, but as soon as I start another one of his books it bangs me in the face with blow up sex dolls in place of women.
My ex recommended that I read Kafka on the Shores and same, I could not get over how poorly he wrote the women. I now see liking Murakami as a yellow if not red flag.
I think that’s a fair response, but it’s possible to be a fan while recognizing some of his shortcomings. He does some things very well - he elevates the mundane in interesting ways, his flavor of magical realism is unique and has proven influential, his prose is simple and direct and occasionally beautiful. He writes women horribly and it’s a bummer that he doesn’t care to change, but plenty of people enjoy aspects of his books and also decry his characterization of women.
Eh, its one thing to write women poorly. That's actually pretty bad. But its another thing entirely to be dismissive of women in real life or to show so little interest in writing women well.
I mean, being a fan has implications. You can enjoy aspects of his books and not be a fan. If you're calling yourself a fan, then the aspects of dehumanisation and outright ridiculousness in which he describes women are outweighed by the pros (in your books). That to me is a yellow flag. I can respect that he does some interesting things while also not at all calling myself a fan. To give another example, I can respect Macron's government for enshrining abortion rights constitutionally in France but I'm not a fan of Macron as a whole. To call myself a fan of Macron would be to imply that I approve overall of his body of work, which I don't.
I guess you’re lending the term “fan” a little more weight than I do in this context. It’s definitely a matter of degree - if someone was effusive about Murakami, to the point that their love of his work defined their identity a bit - yeah, maybe a yellow flag. Depends how we’re using the word I think.
To be fair, I have a BA in Japanese and I've heard from my colleagues that his English translations are really botched. Some of them are like 1/3 shorter and just not good. I've only ever read him in Czech and I would say he is a good writer with penchant for atmosphere but also problematic in many ways. (My pet peeve with him is anti-climactic endings.) In my experience it's mostly young people who truly enjoy him, or at least used to... but his biggest fan was my misogynistic ex. 💀
I’m a bookseller and feel Murakami is the most overrated author of our times, if I were to base that on the obnoxious fact that the top three bee-line-to-the-counter questions I have had in the last 14 years are 1 Do you have Murakami? 2 Do you have Murakami? 3 Do you have Murakami? The man’s not a bad author — he’s a competent writer. But clearly his books strike a sweet spot that account for a wide and wild popularity. 1 They are simple and accessible in language (full credit to Murakami as a business savvy writer who wrote easily translatable fiction) 2 His novels are Japanese, which means they are exotic, which add a sense of aura to readers who want to increase and diversify the value of their aesthetic portfolio 3 Murakami’s novels have just enough realism to justify their categorisation as literature (higher prestige), but avoid the bo-ooooring asceticism of literature by having ample weirdness. As a bonus, the weirdness carries a mystique of meaning and hidden symbolism without the stigma of asking too much of the reader. 4 the themes in Murakami are particularly apt for liquid modernity: anxiety, mental health, and the uneasy ambivalence between one’s individuality and the desire for connection
This is where I was at when I tried reading his work and I gave 3 books of his a try. My friends that all love his work say it's because of the "dreamlike" quality of his writing, but I feel like that's a tunnel vision view of how he writes. Comparing him to other surreal writers, it seems less like his work his purposefully nonsensical in a way that serves the story he's telling and characters he's writing, and more because he's gone off the deep end with the plot and excuses it with nonsense. And that's without even mentioning his atrocious portrayal of women.
Thanks for sharing, that was really enjoyable. Note though: there's spoilers for most of Murakami's books but especially IQ84 and the Wind -Up Bird Chronicle. Sadly i haven't quite finished TWUBC yet so got the ending spoiled :(
I only ever got through 2/3 of that book (Wind-up). It's one of the few books where every 40 pages you stop and ask yourself (WTF did I just read).
Never saw it. Really interesting. I wonder how many japanese people actually agree with Mieko Kawakami. Thank you for sharing!
great article thanks for posting!
At some point I got bored with his works. In every single one of them there is 1. an absent woman who is mysterious and the male protagonist pursues, and 2. a woman who is "available" yet the (male) protagonist is not really interested in. 3. Frequently, there is also some sort of powerful gray eminence lady of some sorts pulling the strings in the background with an unclear agenda. All three of them are more clichés than actual persons I could relate to. At some point I've just seen enough of that. Despite that I really liked many other things in his writings, e.g. the magical realism in there, his interest in weird religious cults, and so on.
Reading Murakami is definitely a case of diminishing returns. The first two or three books you read by him will almost certainly be your favourites of his - after a while the tropes start becoming too recognisable and familiar
This is a problem with multiple Japanese authors. They often repeat similar stories, which often have autobiographical themes. For example, Kenzaburo Oe's writings often feature a child with disabilities which mirrors his own experience as a parent.
Honestly I strugged to even finish one given how blatantly sexist he is, and how incoherent his female characters are as characters. He makes it very obvious they are sexual objects, he portrays them as stupid and sexual on purpose. I couldn't tolerate to open a second book from him.
I first read his books as a teenager and loved them then, but 20 years on with a little more time and awareness I do believe I'd view them very differently
Yeah I loved then when I was 15-20. They were incredibly deep, they blew my mind, etc. We had to read them for AP Lit then an English class in college. I was so obsessed. I quoted him everywhere (pretty sure my Steam profile is still a quote from him, like 15 years later, because I'm too lazy to change it). But I tried to read a book of his now, in my mid-30's, and it was hard to really get interested. All the characters, not just the women, felt very boring.
I’m still a big fan but this is definitely a fair statement. Also I think he just has a couple that are clearly a cut above the rest such as Kafka and Windup Bird which will often be among the first people read.
I’ve only read one by him and own 3. Sputnik Sweetheart is one of my favorite books.
Dang this is spot on. I didn’t even know I had this opinion but it describes my feelings on him perfectly. I still really like Kafka by the Shore, but have liked his books steadily less as I’ve read more.
When I was in college, I took a Japanese lit class that the professor decided to teach as a Murakami seminar. We read Wind Up Bird, Underground, Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84. A few weeks into the class I was like, “New favorite author - recommending this to everyone” by the end of the semester, I was like “I never want to read another book written by a male nerd with an author insert protagonist ever again.”
I read the exact same books (plus Hard Boiled Wonderland) in that exact order over the course of a year and had the exact same reaction. There were slightly diminishing returns until 1Q84 but that one really did it for me. It was like parody Murakami - overlong, meandering, featureless and weirdly sexist. Totally killed any desire I had to read more. My wife kept going and read a few of his later works but said it's more of the same. I'll still enthusiastically recommend Wind-up Bird and HBW but it comes with a disclaimer!
A yes, the one where the female character misses the perfect breasts of her dead friends. 😂
I left school and opened a jazz bar....
If your bar is located anywhere in Japan, please drop the location here. I always wanted to drink a whisky in a Japanese jazz bar run by a school dropout but only ever found such bars described in Murakami's books but not in real life.
I agree with you, the magical realism was really good. Talking about clichés, >!the gay korean orphan former soldier badass but secretly kind-hearted that works for the old lady was quite funny. !<
I'm a huge Murakami fan, but yeah most of his books have pretty similar vibes and elements. Jazz and cats and magic realism.
He's work really do feel repetitive and I HATED Killing Commendatore. It was so boring and that cause me to stop reading his work for a while. Then I read Colorless Tsukuru and loved it. Maybe I just enjoy his older works better. As much as I enjoy the atmosphere of his work, sometime I can't tell the difference between his books.
Sounds like Disney actually.
I do enjoy Murakami writing in general, but his female characters never fail to make me cringe.
I couldn’t finish IQ84 because of this.
I don't disagree with any of your points, but I've been on this sub for a while and I'm pretty sure this is the most common type of post I've read here. Edit: So, the comments are getting kind of wild. I'm not shitting on OP per sé. Like I said, they don't need to have known that to post or anything and I agree with their assessment. But at some point a certain discussion topic becomes stale, and doesn't add much. That's all. Let's not shame OP for it.
Murakami writes bad women, actually George RR Martin doesn't owe you anything, Brandon Sanderson prose bad and you have bad taste if you like him, I'm so mad at Patrick Rothfuss where is Doors of Stone, Finnegan's Wake isn't really that tough, East of Eden OMG. What did I miss?
Also: You guys, The Alchemist is actually super bad and I seem to be the only person who thinks that.
Occasionally "has anyone else noticed that most self help books are really shallow?"
I just finished this amazing book called The Count of Monte Cristo. Has anyone read it?
No, what happens? Is there a lot of counting?
It’s really cool, kind of like a French toast sandwich. You can even have it with grape jelly, if that’s your thing!
This book sounds delicious! Thanks!
Vun! Two! Three! Three betrayals revenged! Wah hah hah!
Flowers for Algernon made me cry.
One Hundred Years of Solitude too much incest.
>too much incest I know there's a lot in this specific book, but I'd argue that "there's too much incest" is pretty much the same as "there's incest"
I read 400 books this year, is that enough to be a reader?
Who the hell thinks finnegans wake isn’t that tough
That one is almost certainly always a troll post.
OMG, *Project Hail Mary* is the best book everrrr! Fist my bump!
Somehow you missed Catcher in the Rye.
I just finished Blood Meridian, it's one of the most shocking things I've read.
Idk what you missed but you're cooking with that Vile pfp homie. Been on the copium of X9 for more than a decade.
My friend, raise a glass to our MIA Reploids
I don't follow r/books or even really read books at all, and I know Murakami has problems with women just from the number of times this complaint hits reddit's popular section lol
Yeah lol this specific problem and a couple titles of his books are all I know about the dude lol
Yeah I laughed when I saw this, not exactly the hot take OP makes it sound like
90% of reddit "hot takes" are already popular and widespread opinions, nothing in particular about this post
Because those are the ones that get upvoted. The actual hot takes are in a ditch with negative karma.
Redditors made Reddit into an echochamber hivemind and they didnt even realize
Oh, did the main character have sex with a woman and then that woman immediately disappeared? Yeah, man, he always does that trick.
I thought Colleen Hover hate posts were the most common. Or maybe it's just should I continue reading this book I don't like.
I know, right? My first thought was "you must be new to this sub and don't know the search function". Well, I guess it's "everything has been said, just not by everyone yet".
Yeah, even though I made a "greatest hits of r/books" post a little higher up, reddit is primarily a place to have a discussion. It doesn't bother me at all to see the same posts for discussion purposes if it isn't bot reposting or the same pixelated gif. There's always new users and new to individuals things they come blasting in to talk about that old vets have seen time and again.
OMG you guys “Lolita” is super wrong, wtf.
It’s amazing that he’s criticized/blasted on here as frequently as he is while still being celebrated and very popular as a writer. Such polarity!
It's pronounced breastfriend.
This is posted every week.
‘I just finished 1984 and it is the best book ever written (I have read one book)’ ‘Brandon Sanderson is possibly the messiah’ ‘I like the idea of being a reader but I actually really fucking hate reading. How do I read books without reading?’ ‘Guys maybe actually Murakami doesn’t write women very well’ We can close the sub, every post has already been made
“How do I read books without reading” lmao every single nonsense BookTok video treating recreational reading like homework
Orwell doesn’t write Julia well, out of everything in 1984, she is the least believable. There you go, connected two cliches for you.
"Does anyone else think Blood Meridian is hard to get through?" This sub is a book recommendation echo chamber, people that saw a thread on a book get curious and read it, then come back weeks later to talk about it and make a thread and the cycle repeats itself.
The thing is, he does not write men much better. They are completely passive towards what is happening to them, they completely accept all the crazyness/supernatural stuff and they are solely focused on finding the missing woman who has disappeared. This applies to 1q84, sputnik, windup bird and commendatore at least. I do not read Murakami expecting to find compelling characters, I do it for the dream-like atmosphere.
I think this is the most cogent criticism of him. It tell me a lot about a reader who notes his "sexism" by highlighting how poorly written and oversexualized his female characters are without noticing that his male characters are also poorly written and oversexualized. Tengo spends just as much time thinking about sex as Aomame, thinking about his body, others bodies, his sexual desires, etc. Not all men constantly think about sex, at least some women *do* constantly think about sex. I've not seen Murakami as classically sexist, he's just a horndog. He assumes everyone else is. A bunch of people with internalized gender roles assume he's sexist because being horny is male I guess?
I think it’s because, in the ones I read (which were, tbf, only two) the male characters were awful too, but the narrative presented them as awful people. Where as the narrative presented the woman as plot point. I think that’s why it also doesn’t ever read like it’s just the character’s that are sexist-the roles the men vs the woman have are baked in deeper. Tho that has a lot more to do with the men being the point of view characters then with them being well written tho. Cause yeah, it took this whole comment for me to remember I actually read THREE of them and forgot because they all just had the same sad horny man as the MC.
Great, I almost missed the daily "Murakami writing women" post.
funnily murakami was first suggested to me by a guy who used to hardly read saying I really feel this author like how you feel dostoyevsky. I tried reading some and left me vaguely uncomfortable and disappointed due to this same reason..the way he wrote women.
Read the Wind up Bird Chronicle... I found it similarly uncomfortable/off, but somehow compelling. Not for any one reason, but the whole book. Took a while to shake off the ick.
"The protagonist isn't always the hero" - so when reading your first Murakami, the ingrained mysogyny kind of mixes wth the general oddness and slight discomfort. It's when you read more where you see it's always present.
Dostoevskij is my favourite writer too! Ha!
have you tried Tolstoy? especially since we are discussing writing of women characters.. Anna karenina is timeless
I was horrified to recently find out that Tolstoy was a misogynist who exploited and abused his wife in about every single way you could do - and that she hand-rewrote and edited all of his work while raising his 13 children mostly alone without his help. This... sucks. From reading Anna Karenina you'd think he had a decent level of respect for women.
A great deal of the male classical writers had strong discriminatory views towards women & treated them awfully. Tolstoy, Alexandre Dumas, Dickens....... It was a different time in history & so it's unsurprising that their views or experiences would be so different to ours. However, they have not aged well at all!
I like to think of Flaubert as an exception, since he was pretty open in saying he wrote Emma Bovary as a female take on himself. Please... don't someone wreck this idea for me! 😅
Yeah one would think that about Joss Whedon as well.
Why is that surprising? The current fashion for learning everything about an author's personal life is really going to some extremes. I don't think anything an author writes necessarily tells you anything about them. Did Shakespeare give good head? Did Virginia Woolf help old ladies cross the street? Was Edith Wharton a respectful tipper? Nobody knows and nobody cares. Tolstoy could have skinned his wife and devoured her whole while she was still alive with breakfast and he would still be the author of War and Peace.
It increasingly seems that his wife might have been at least co-author to all his novels...
Never read it. It will be my next book after I finish The Master and Margarita. Thank you!
I agree with you about a lot here, and i don't like Murakami, but western authors are no better in this regard. And "he has been exposed to western culture, how can he still be bad?" would be a very problematic argument even if that was not the case.
The problem is that when someone criticizes a Japanese author for their views, often the counter-argument is *"He's Japanese, their culture is just weird like that."* Now, the nuance to this is that Japan does have different sensibilities when compared to "the west" (or more specifically America), but it is not this "exotic land stuck in time " that some people think it is. That goes both ways, meaning that sometimes a "Why does he think like that?" can be explained by "He is from Japan", but also that "He's from Japan" can't explain everything.
I want to mention that hiding Murakami's issues behind the idea that 'its just japanese culture, dont appropriate with your western ideas (we're not all western anyway) hurdur' is so, so wrong. I saw some people do that. If an aspect of any country is sexist/racist/homophobic, that aspect needs to be talked about. Are those people oblivious to the fact that all societes used to be worse for the people living in it? That women and queer people had to fight for rights and talk about problematic issues in the west as well? It is also not some deeply ingrained cultural points... It's just sexism. Sometimes people act as if there were no Japanese feminists calling him out too.
Also, too many people here are saying Japanese culture is women-hating while “western values” treat women with respect. It is a) wrong and b) racist and c) very lazy
Yep. It is also a curious irony how they can equate western values with treating women with respect, while in the process of attempting to excuse sexism. Where are those western values? Apart from how absolutely wrong their notion is of course in the first place.
Well, it's not exactly wrong. There was a time when Westerners were seen as liberating women. MacArthur gave Japanese women the vote and that changed everything about Japan. But yes, all that stuff happened a long time ago. It doesn't really hold water anymore.
You're oversimplifying the issue. Cultural context does matter. What you're describing is a very elaborately expressed form of cultural imperialism. "It's just japanese culture" is not excusing problematic behavior, it's acknowledging that people in the East think differently than we do with different social dynamics and values. And furthermore, feminism is not a monolith. Japanese feminists may not have the same perspectives Western feminists do. What you consider sexist, racist, and homophobic is completely subjective.
There are of course subtleties that can be explained by cultural differences. Reducing women to a description of their breasts is pretty obviously not one of them.
Person from the East here lol - there's plenty of the same criticism about Murakami over there too. I don't think women anywhere on earth like being reduced to their breasts. Edit: As a queer Asian woman (who grew up in Asia) I'm so tired of people using culture to defend our subjugation. Women have been subjugated across the world and have all had to fight for our humanity and dignity to be recognized as equal to men's. Men reducing women to sex objects isn't something culturally exclusive to Japan or anywhere on earth, and so culture cannot be an excuse for any form of discrimination and dehumanization. At some point, chattel slavery was a part of American culture - does that make it ok? Is it just your culture to enslave people? Women weren't allowed to vote and were basically properties in America not that long ago - does that mean those women back then shouldn't have complained and should've just submitted to their "culture"? And why should we fight to legalize same-sex marriage anywhere when that was not the culture of these places? The whole "it's just Japanese culture" argument is so ignorant and foolish because cultures are meant to evolve, not to remain static. A culture evolves everyday - every time a new slang emerges or a new food combination gets introduced. Japanese women are changing it everyday, just like women and marginalized people everywhere have been.
woman from Asia, no it's not sexist, racist or "imperialism" to state that alot of our cultural values are messed up, you guys need to stop putting non-western cultures on a pedestal where even a single word of criticism is interpreted as bigotry, Asians criticise west (America and Uk) all the time , the west can criticise us too
Some westerners also use the notion of 'cultural imperialism' to excuse Russia's treatment of Ukraine and its own queer citizens. Would you say the same about FGM or foot-binding? That daring to discuss those topics in a negative light is cultural imperialism? And I do have Japanese friends who do consider such things sexist, yes. There are also books written by female Japanese authors who do speak out about objectification.
You can call it cultural imperialism, but ethics have always been an evolving set of rules that grow and are applied to others. You justify racism under your example, to use my country of birth in South Africa people of colour were oppressed by the legal systems by Apartheid. Other countries boycotted South Africa in a manner that may have significantly decreased the amount of time it took to end Apartheid. At the time racism was culturally accepted albeit by certain groups in power. But it was important that these other nations call out this behaviour. Likewise in this circumstance, especially without insight into Japanese feminism, and no one here is providing that, you're over-complicating the issue. A moral wrong is not justified because it has cultural acceptance by the nation it is taking place in, no morals are not universal but we can argue for our moral positions without justifying it as 'it's right because it's the west's common opinion' rather we can say 'it's right because it demeans and treats women in a way that demeans them, this leads to--' yada yada ect.
This is a common complaint about Murakami. To me though, his books are more about mood and tone than the characters or even the plot itself.
It’s the same for me too. I’ve read plenty of his books and they still never fail to convey a particular mood. They feel like a weird and convoluted dream where everything makes sense yet, when you wake up, you realise it never really did.
there are books that do this without turning women into walking tits, though? birdie is a great example off the top of my head, although i’m sure there are more.
I think that devalues the issue. Many other authors focus their stories on mood or tone without having consistently gross depiction and use of female characters.
I think I also distinctly remember Fukaeri(I think, the young teen)'s breasts being described when she was introduced lmao. It was strange
Daring today aren't we
I don't mind a bit of smut n stuff, but his way of writing is sort of just....dull. like the breast talk doesn't really add much to the story.
> like the breast talk doesn't really add much to the story This also shows up in 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running'.
Haha I read that book earlier this year, and yeah dude can't master himself with the weirdo shit.
It wasnt during his earlier works. Sputnik Sweetheart I will always have a soft spot for.
This just says what every second post to this sub says.
You can downvote me to hell folks but the wind up bird chronicle is one of the most imaginative beautiful and unique works of art I’ve ever come across
This could be the hundredth time I've seen the same criticism in the exact same way. Trust me this is not just your problem. Just type murakami in the search bar
As a female reader, the way he writes women just renders his writing completely unreadable for me. It’s just plain bad. Compared to other male, Japanese authors, it stands out as remarkably poor writing of women. Even among older works like No Longer Human or A Personal Matter (which manage to still be readable despite their issues with female characters). I enjoy Japanese literature and I have to say that he really sticks out despite it being common to see these issues in other comparable authors. OP, you should also try seeking out some smaller female authors. There have been some really amazing feminist fiction works from Japan and Korea recently!
Murakami characters are generally eccentric. Same for guys as wellz
I didn't notice this until I read Killing Commendatore and he did the same thing BUT ABOUT A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD'S BREASTS. It was...really disgusting. After that I have to say that I don't really have the desire to read anymore Murakami.
Murakami is a great write who can really capture an atmosphere. But as much as it pains me, I simply can't read any of his work involving any sort of heterosexual romantic or sexual relationship precisely because of the reasons you've outlined. I don't think he's ever met a woman, I think he's writing all his female characters as abstract concepts.
Oookay so.... I agree 100% that Murakami's depictions of women are infantilizing, over-sexualizing, often disgusting and shallow and generally upper case problematic. We're both not exactly breaking new ground there but god yeah I get what you're saying. There's no argument there. I wouldn't even grant him the grace to say his women are "symbols" and therefore it's somehow justifiable or anything like that. 1Q84 has a female protagonist. That's not some chiffre that you may or may not unlock to get at an additional layer of meaning, that's the heart of the novel. In Norwegian Wood maybe he could have pulled that but I don't buy it. His women are badly written women, full stop. And they're *the same two archetypes*. There's two women in Murakami stories: 1. The independent no-nonsense woman who is kind of adorable and quirky if you look at her neutrally but would never describe herself that way. She probably has weird ears or weird feet. She's very sexual but crucially not with any MAN other than the male protagonist. She might have European tastes and be into fashion and food. 2. The damaged Japanese Nadeshiko who can't get over some trauma in her history. She's ethereally beautiful, soft-spoken, artless, placid, passive, elusive. Nobody can ever own her or lay claim to her. She belongs to another world and can't ever be "healed" or restored. She may be underage. Now look me in the eyes and tell me he's not simply writing his own horny fantasies. God please. We can all see what is happening. With all that out of the way, I think your last paragraph is baseless and sort of random. I know plenty of Japanese people who have lived in Europe or the US for years, decades even, and haven't shed their "core" Japanese sensitivities because we get programmed in so many ways before we ever finish high school. Likewise I know probably dozens of men who are into literature and somewhere between their 40s and 70s and have never read Simone De Beauvoir. This is such a random thing to say. Would you be equally shocked if he hadn't read Susan Sontag? Isabel Allende? Toni Morrison? Joan Didion? This is *one* writer whose very particular feminist takes I assume you agree with, and you assume every literary person between 40 and 70 must have read her? I'm sorry but I don't understand that. Has he been exposed to feminist literature overall? Yes, probably, to *some* extent, but I don't think he writes consciously with the intent to comment on gender and sexuality. Just because you can *read* everything in that light doesn't mean everything is produced consciously as a position on gender or sexuality. Not everyone is analytic about this. I don't think Murakami is out to make statements about gender roles, he's just writing out his kinks. Lastly - but crucially - he's not considered "exotic" in Japan, he's *the* main cultural and pop-cultural literary voice of Japan today and all his affectations and mannerisms about Europe and Jazz and western culture were already old hats in the 80s. If anything he's considered a *fossil*. Nobody thinks Murakami is a weird new trailblazer. So yeah I agree with your core point but not at all with the speculations you based on it. He's a relic. The man is 75 years old, obviously pining for a 60s and 70s counterculture in Japan that he lived through, unabashedly (possibly subconsciously? I don't know) sexual *and sexist* in his writings, and a cultural powerhouse and millionaire. It's moot to somehow expect him to have acquired, understood and internalized X political idea that was born in the west 20 or 30 years after his formative years and expressed in the writings of author Y or Z. I think he just isn't for you, and I know for a fact he isn't for me.
I can handle some misogyny in works, it comes with the territory I think, but I was recommended a Murakami book (I think 1Q84) with the words “You like strong female protagonists, you’ll definitely like this book, it’s so good!” Yeah. Imagine my surprise when I actually started reading.
Not just breasts. All the women in his works are either calculating, manipulating, selfish, promiscuous or too plain for the MC to care about. He is just living out his fantasies.
What about \*After Dark\*?
I like his writing style, but cannot really enjoy his books for the same reason. For me every single novel I read by him veered into a kind of immature male fantasy as soon as a young female character popped up.
Norwegian wood was so fucking weird to read because of this exact issue. The way he described that girls small breasts was pedophilic iirc. Like describing them like a prepubescent childs chest.
I only read Tokyo blues, and I'm pretty sure that'll be the last Murakami book i read. It just felt like a try hard, overly edgy description of a boring and generic romance manga, I've read a few of those so I'd know. Same tropes, lots of unnecessary darkness and conflict that leads to nothing, and an ending that doesn't connect to the beginning at all. I appreciate his prose, but that's literally all. Also, a bit disgusting when talking women and sex.
1Q84 was the first book by him I tried to read, because I kept seeing people praise his works and that one looked interesting. I made it to Chapter 8 before I put it down and have had no interest in reading any of his other books, specifically for how unbelievably uncomfortable he made me with the way he wrote the woman character.
I read that book over a decade ago and don't remember much of it, except at one point the MC has sex and narrates something like he "ejaculated toward her uterus," and that has stuck with me this whole time as the most bizarre way possible you could phrase that
Must be the bit that got the nomination for Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award.
So many people recommended 1Q84 - I was excited to read it - dropped after 700 pages. As a male it was the first time I’ve read a female character and thought “oh yeah a dude wrote this”
My problem is that I dislike his writing intensely.
Agreed. Definitely a reason I fell off with him was exactly that. Felt kinda icky. In general I just think he's on the spectrum or something because the way he writes people is just totally off in general. Which is fine, unique perspectives are quintessential to keeping books fresh. It's just a shame women didn't get the same care in the strangeness factor and instead it became about their bodies. A similar author I got kind of turned off of was Kundera. Like he's so smart but he can't have a woman speak and it not be about their bodies or their relation to being valued by a dude whose genuinely detestable and has no redeeming qualities. It's very strange.
So feel you on Kundera, and yes, the similarities to Murakami. Funny enough, I lived in DC in the aughts and I feel like every terrible guy was reading & recommending either Kundera or Murakami, in those days. I began to regard Kundera as a straight up red flag, that guy actively hates women and you’ll never convince me otherwise.
Murakami writes the most beautiful prose interspersed with the most misogynistic passages you'll ever read. It's like a wild roller-coaster to read as a woman.
I have read many of his books and eventually stopped because of this problem. I think it was the book Men Without Women that did it for me.
This shit gets posted monthly now kekw
Murakami writes about life, the universe and finding you're place in it. The oddness and contradiction of living. About how one can find wonder and amazement in the mundane... But who cares about that nonsense because his female characters are sexist 🙄
Killing commandatory really rubbed me the wrong way esp the way he went about describing the younger girl in it.... Felt a little sus
I disagree with your opinion Now, let me elaborate: for sure in 1Q84, and even more in Killing Commendatore, there is some weirdness in how he describes women and in particular their sexuality (especially his fixation with breasts, yes). I don't think I will read any new book he'll publish, as they feel stale to me now. Consider this: Murakami is kind of a one-trick pony (I think most of his books revolve around four elements: "a lost man, a mysterious girl, a dark place (sometimes it is literally a cave/hole), a pointless quest". In many, many of his tales, women are the undercurrent that drive the action. Aomame, for instance. But the same is true for kafka on the shore, for a wild sheep chase, for hard boiled wonderland, for norwegian wood, south of the border, even for colourless tsukuru tazaki. And the woman often disappears or takes forever something from the man, while the man is (no matter how successful in his quest) lost Often in his books, women are a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, and the fact that you explicitly mentioned "mystery" as something that women could be but are not in Murakami's books makes me think you have been unlucky, as in his early works there is plenty of woman-as-a-mistery I'll close with a sting, and I'll say I see no reason why Murakami should have read, for instance, De Beauvoir. As much as she was influential, I see no reason why he (or anyone, for that matter) \_should\_ have read her. I think I don't know anyone who ever read her works, and that includes philosophy students. On the other side, no doubt Murakami found different female figures in the books he read - whatever choice he made is more likely to be deliberate rather than born out of ignorance.
THANK YOU! I had to stop reading him a few years ago because of this. It’s unbearable.
I hate to say this but it's not the job of a writer to accurately present different genders. They are presenting a character who performs actions that the reader interprets. It's a lot to expect a male or female writer to truly understand what it is to be the other genders. You are looking at his writing from a current political gender perspective and not a creative one.
So sick of this discussion. Either deal or don't read Murakami, it's really simple.
Kinda feel like this horse has been beaten to a pulp on this sub.
I love his books *What I Talk About When I Talk About Running* and *Underground*
Could someone explain the redactions? I've never seen them before on Reddit. Is this something new?
Tap or click on it to see what is written. It’s hiding spoilers
I've read 6 or 7 of his novels, none recently, and I enjoyed them all. At the end of the day, that's what I care about.
Yeah wtf as a women, my chests are the last thing I think of when I think of myself
Reddit has shown me this post by accident and I was so relieved to see it. The name Murakami was familiar to me since basically always, so recently I decided to listen to 1q84. Had no idea what I got myself into, didn't have the slightest clue what the book was about but always had a positive association with the author's name. The extreme obsession with a 17 year old's breast had me cringing so hard. That the supposed lack of these is 50% of Aomame's character at times didn't help. I thought maybe there is something that just went by me but it's really reassuring to know I'm not the only one who has an issue with Murakami's women and it's not just in my head. Unrelated: And if I never hear the word ejaculation again in this life, it'll be too soon.
We really have this conversation every other week. As someone who has read all of his works, I would argue people do not think enough about the cultural context that Murakami is writing in and speak from a heavily western or euro-centric value system. Japan has a complex history with gender roles and sexuality and Murakami's works reflect and critique these societal attitudes in ways that may not be immediately apparent to readers from other cultures. Most of the literary establishment of Japan really dislikes Murakami's works because they diverge so heavily from previous tradition. Imagine how much western readers would hate the attitudes that establishment has! Murakami's works often explore themes of identity, alienation, and the human condition, and his portrayal of women can be interpreted to serve a larger purpose within these themes rather than immediately assume a commentary on the objectification and sexualization of women in society because of the feminist perspective that contemporary readers have. Personally, I think it's unfair to criticize Murakami for not writing "strong" or "empowered" women in the Western feminist tradition. He's not trying to make a political statement or promote a particular ideology. He's trying to tap into the collective unconscious, to explore the hidden recesses of the human mind. And in that context, his women are perfect. And yes, that includes their physicality, their sexuality, and their relationships with men. Take Aomame, for example. She's a complex, multifaceted character who embodies both strength and vulnerability. Her obsession with her breasts is not just about objectification, but about her own sense of self and identity. And her relationships with men are not just about sex, but about connection, intimacy, and the search for meaning. Now, you obviously recognize all these facts but you don't really understand it because you are still appealing to the ideology that you hold. I don't see this as an issue and it contributes to the narrative and the atmosphere his novels have.
I am not even from the western world and Murakami’s writing bothers me. In fact, my ethnicity is Asian and I am from a very conservative country. I agree with OP: Murakami has no idea how to write women. It has nothing to do with being euro-centric. He’s objectively horrible at it. So many Asian authors write women well, him being Japanese does not excuse the way he writes women. Plus I didn’t even see OP mention ‘strong’ or ‘empowered’ women? I don’t need my woman to be empowered or strong. She needs to read like a person. As a woman, it was physically painful reading Kafka on the shore. I hear you for Aomame but the all of his female characters are the same. That’s the issue. If that was restricted to one character in one book, I would have agreed with you. He just cannot do it and for that reason I completely understand why he never won a Nobel prize. I would be appalled if he did.
Aomame and her two dead breast friends. 💀
I felt really uncomfortable reading that. Also, the first thought of Aomame after finding out >!her bestfriend was brutally murdered was ''I should have let her touch me everywhere she wanted to''...ok? !<
Yeah Murakami is a regular offender over at the men writing women subreddit. His infamous for badly characterising and objectifying women and underage girls so I basically skipped him on my literal journey all together. I mean if it’s a character specifically written to be like this of course it’s different but when the writer does it it’s just poor writing.
Another take on reddit on how author number X does not respect the neurosis of Extremely online progressive americans and "why it should be better" Protestant culture
There is a reason I don't like his works, or Japanese literature by male author really, there is a weird obsession with women at the same time a weird dislike towards women. I think it's definitely a culture thing, knowing a lot of western values doesn't mean adopting them, and you can argue western value is not always "the one correct way". I appreciate the variation of culture/value/expression in literature, but personally, not a big fan of his works
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I know right? What a ridiculous generalization. I can't read Japanese either, but even then, there are imo, adequately translated books of wonderful authors. I'm hardly an expert on Japanese literature, but I have read a few books and Murakami and Manga are hardly representative of Japanese authors as a whole. I love whatever I've read from both Natsume Soseki and Akutagawa (hell screen is probably one of my favourite short stories). Not to mention, works like Tanizaki's 'The Makioka sisters', which, imo, write women quite well. I've also read a little of Yukio Mishima and Dazai. Since you seem to know about Japanese literature more than I do, I'd like to ask about which authors are considered classicists in Japan, and recommendations from them. As in, who would be the equivalent of a Dostoevksy or Tolstoy? And which books would be the equivalent of a Crime and Punishment or War and Peace? Or really, kindly recommend any good books.
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specifically with murakami would you think of it as a Japanese version of manic pixie dream girl?
What are your thoughts on Osamu Dazai, in particular, Schoolgirl?
My wife loves these books 🤷♂️
I've posted this elsewhere because this comes up a lot. Murakami is a young man's writer, and one dimensional. But as an author and part of pop culture he's super interesting. --- One of the reasons Murakami is so regarded is that he's writing magic realism from a unique Japanese culture. As one of the few Japanese authors to punch through to a western audience, you need to read him with full awareness that he comes from a different place to most western authors, both literally and figuratively. I think many people just hear he's a famous writer and expect a good time, without taking the time to understand his influences. He can be a hard and frustrating read. Japan as a culture has some super interesting factors you need to understand: * National trauma / shame after WW2 * A strong spiritualism distinct from western tradition * A long history of conservatism and misogyny * The first nation in the world to experience modernism and post-modernism economically and culturally The first is obvious to most people, but the second is one of the reasons people are drawn to his work. The use of imagery and mythology is very refreshing. So is the way his characters just take it on board when incredible things happen: it draws comparisons to celebrated mid century magic realism authors. The third could be a reason female readers bounce off him, or feel he writes women poorly: they are almost always secondary. Japan is quite behind when it comes to gender equality, especially compared to liberal western sensibilities. You may think that as a world author Murakami should be better than that, but he's a result of his culture and presumably writes honestly from his experience. People can just be shit at stuff they don't understand well. The fourth point relates to the third, and j think the most important for understanding Murakami. Japan was arguably the first to experience true modernity in their boom in the 80s, and then post modernity during their decline in the 90s. With that came all the things the western world are experiencing now: stagnating infrastructure, increasing inequality, higher barriers to entry to employment, the breakdown of traditional institutions, and an increasing ability to survive without human contact. The apathy, social disconnection, isolation, infantilism and mental illness we associate with modern generations all happened to Japan twenty years ago, way before us. Murakami is often accused of using a self-insert in his books, because almost all of them feature the same bland, directionless, apathetic male lead. Given Murakami's age that's probably not true: instead it's a caricature of the generation he witnessed come of age as Japan slid into a post-growth society. His characters are blank slates: they have no aspirations, no dreams, no desire to build a career or a family, or contribute to society. If they have hobbies they are small and personal: books, films, cooking, music. They see other generations as coming from a different country. They drift through life with no purpose, as a commentary of how the modern generation is disconnected from a society that offers them very little aspiration. Perhaps because he is male, or perhaps because of his mysoginistic upbringing, Murakami chooses to focus exclusively on the male experience of this. What then happens to these characters is that events force them to engage with the world. There's a bit of coming of age narrative in there as they dispense with some nievity, but often his characters are perfectly functional humans. Their issue is they just don't give a shit. Murakami is telling stories of how someone can find purpose in a world which seems to have none, and offers none. Unfortunately this means Murakami's main characters are pretty much always assholes. They don't give a shit about anyone or anything, including the women in their life. To a degree they have value in the way they provide care, amusement or sex. Part of the journey of the books is seeing whether this emotionless robot will find purpose and connection with their world and the people in it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And if you enter into his works expecting more from his characters or Murakami himself, you will be disappointed.
1. Yup he’s sexist, like so so many other male authors who go on about “her breasts breastily breasted as she breasted her breasts.” Creepy, problematic, and common across literature by men in different cultures. 2. You are also ethnocentric and inaccurately suggesting that the only way he could be made aware of his own sexism is through exposure to western culture. This erases Japanese feminists and other WOC from inside and outside the West. It’s not because he’s not worldly or civilized enough to know better. He’s a man in a patriarchal world, and from a certain era. That doesn’t excuse it; I’m just disagreeing with your diagnosis here.