Haruki Murakami's Pathetic Female Characters

Murakami is one of my favorite authors of all time. I love that he is so prolific (this is a bad reason to love an author, I know), but in fact, I love that for the past year or two there is an almost endless supply of novels that he has written that I can take with me on my next trip. I used never to read more than the most famous book of an author, and then move on to the next (This makes me sound like a prick, but hear me out: a lot of times books become famous because they really are the best ones of a particular author). But I really got stuck on Murakami. I read them in the following order, just so you know where I'm coming from: Norwegian Wood; Kafka on the Shore; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; South of the Border, West of the Sun; and Sputnik Sweetheart.

What I love about Murakami is that his novels are so dazzlingly easy to read. On a surface level, they are themselves written like blog-posts, with a few more metaphors thrown in. Yet then there are truly beautiful moments: one conversation in Kafka on the Shore between central character Kafka and his friend Oshima about literature really stays with me, about how the flaws of a novel can be what makes it truly touching, because the emotions behind it are raw even if it is not as technically perfect. This rings true to me, and mirrors the very simplistic way in which he often writes. In Norwegian Wood there is a beautiful study of the psychology between Naoko and Midori. I felt myself simultaneously to be both Naoko and Midori: quiet and reserved with a strong sense of duty and a crippling amount of self-doubt, and also wild and free, sexy and approachable and fun. And I thought to myself, “This is what a novel is supposed to do: characters are beautiful to us because we relate to them, and they are interesting to the novelist because he has created them through the process of relating to them. So here we all are together, sharing the same mental space of this character. How lovely!”

But as I have read more Murakami novels, I have become a little disheartened, especially as I started noting a trend in his female characters. At first I thought it was because I was beginning to see the seams: there are certain metaphors that he reuses (being at the bottom of a well; this happens literally in the wind-up bird chronicle but is referenced other times in his other works). And then there are characters that he re-uses, particularly the emotionally stunted woman as opposed to the sexy fun woman: Nutmeg Akasaka, the fashion designer in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is just the same as Miss Seiki in Kafka on the Shore, or Miu in Sputnik Sweetheart, or Shinamoto and Izumi, both women from South of the Border, West of the Sun. The lively girls are Midori, May Kasahara, and Sumire.

But then I thought to myself that it had to be more than that, because for some reason I found some of them to be truly more relatable than others. Some of those characters seem unapproachable except from a sexual standpoint. In Norwegian Wood I loved Midori not because she had a sexy body, but because she said exciting things, she forced Toru to be more interesting.

Here I will go through novel by novel:

In Kafka on the Shore, I did not get distracted by my dislike of his female characters because they did not play particularly important roles in the novel. I was so interested in Kafka that I was happy enough with the interesting character of Oshima, and the sweet Nakata.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle seemed like a very different kind of novel because of the prevalence of expository writing. For example, Murakami includes long passages describing Kumiko's childhood and the personality of her brother, Noboru Wataya. I found the description of Noboru Wataya was un-satisfactory. It seemed not to sketch a character, but to condemn him. I'm not sure if I am saying this well, but somehow I felt as though it was un-objective in some way, as if it were based on some really irritating person that Murakami met who he just went off on a tangent about. Furthermore, these descriptions really hijacked it from being about Kumiko, who we just don’t get much from (admittedly, this is also how the central character feels. We get nothing from her because she has run away with a lover). I felt that May Kasahara was really supposed to be like Midori, but somehow May just irritated me. I could not get over my feeling: why are you, some dumpy old middle-aged man, taking advantage of this lonely little sixteen-year-old's free time so you can stare at her bangin' body? I suppose this bothered me less in Midori because both the male narrator ad Midori were the same age in this novel.

In South of the Border, West of the Sun Hajime's affair made me really irrationally angry; perhaps it is my own experiences that make me react so violently to someone's "I had no choice but to go have sex with other people" statement. I just didn't feel appeased when his wife ultimately gets to say, "You just didn't think about how I would feel at all, did you?" I just felt as though the novel itself was a kind of justification. It was a recounting of 'what happened' in all of his exploits that created facts (all novels, in creating a story, create facts). He says, “I know it was wrong, but I would have done it all again if I could.” How can I accept that? How can he possibly be apologizing and saying that at the same time? It’s not an apology at all. But at the same time, I had to keep asking myself: am I being unreasonable? Am I only reacting this way because I am female? What if the roles had been reversed? I didn’t seem nearly as pissed at Kumiko in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle who is doing essentially the same thing. I still haven’t decided if that means I should condemn Kumiko more, or if I should indeed be more sympathetic towards Hajime.

In Sputnik Sweetheart, I just couldn't get out of my head the image of the main character as a kind of voyeur, wanting to come in on this hot lesbian couple. That makes it sound too simple; I know that the title character really loves Sumire, and for more than just her body. He loves her creativity, and her way of thinking about literature and the demands she makes of him. But her body simply became too prominent for me. It was too white and slender in contrast to the overweight yet sexy body of the male narrator’s girlfriend. In the parts that Sumire wrote, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading what a man thought a lesbian would write. I hate that I am having this reaction. It seems so terribly gendered, as if I cannot stand to read something from a perspective other than my own, or that I am unwilling to accept that other people can write from perspectives other than their own. How presumptive!

Finally I realized it was this: I only love Murakami when he succeeds in walking a fine line between insurmountable depression and realism. The insurmountable depression, moreover, must be realistic. I find it realistic when his characters shut down into a sort of insurmountable depression that flows along with the vicissitudes of daily life, rather than acting in vast, melodramatic ways. Naoko's suicide made me feel two ways: a little uncomfortable because I had related to her unhappiness, and what if that meant I was going to die? and then a little more comfortable, because I reacted by saying, "No, of course I would never do something like that. She was seriously crazy. In fact, we really aren't alike precisely because she commits suicide. Really, I'm much more like fun, cool Midori." But then I was insecure: I need to feel that I am different from such people or maybe something terrible will happen to me. The other female character in this story, the music teacher who lives with Naoko and seems to have an ambiguously romantic friendship with her, Reiko Ishida, overcomes her sadness and re-enters real life. Murakami expresses this desire to join life again when she goes out and has a big meal with Toru.

It seems to me that Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood are, after all, his most popular novels, and I think it is because those female characters are not so very hopeless. They seem more developed and relatable, and the novel is more interested in capturing how they feel than in some of the other novels.

Furthermore, I think I am justified in saying that South of the Border, West of the Sun really was less compelling. Because it got more melodramatic than it could handle: he sees his ex-girlfriend, who he cheated on, through a window and sees how her face is permanently changed, forever altered to be sad and hopeless. Similarly, this happens a few pages later to Hajime after his affair with Shinamoto falls through: "Something inside me was severed and disappeared. Silently. For ever." 179

I, like everyone else, just refuse to believe that. I can't take an entirely unhappy ending, because it is also unrealistic that endings are so very unhappy. Naoko’s suicide is just Naoko’s suicide, but if you try to say it is a human phenomenon of people living in a cloud of isolating unhappiness, that we are all, like the sputnik, hurtling through space alone, I just can’t agree in defense of my own happiness. Not that he comes down on that note. In the end, they always just go along with a little shrug and an, “oh well,” and keep picking their kids up from school, and making healthy meals with fish and vegetables. So aren’t those things incompatible? Can’t we answer the part about the Sputnik just by saying, “look at the pretty way that the light looks on these lovely green vegetables. What a beautiful color,” and concluding that the joy of looking at the vegetables outweigh the reality of hurtling through lonely, incommunicable space so that we keep on living? Why can’t you just end with a little, “I’m not a sputnik.” That would show a kind of hope towards the future. Or maybe a denile of reality in the process of summoning hope. At any rate, I feel the explicit statement needs to be made, or I’ll just sit here, unhappy that my unhappy book ended.