Murakami's Female Characters

While reading Murakami's writings and his potential source of influence in pairs during the past few weeks, one thing that jumps out the most to me is how different Murakami portrays female characters when compared to other writers. Most, if not all, female characters in Murakami's stories we've read so far lack personality or individuality. The female characters in the other non-Murakami stories each have their individual passions and desires, pains and worries, which is very hard to detect in Murakami's writings.

The female characters in Murakami's books only occasionally help the lonesome male protagonist push the plot forward, then disappear to the background as the male protagonist goes on his journey to search for something to "complete" himself (for lack of a better term). The girlfriends in A Wild Sheep Chase and "A Perfect Day for Kangaroos" are portrayed to be bizarrely naive so that they can spark Boku to say something philosophical. Boku's girlfriend with beautiful ears in A Wild Sheep Chase is even given psychic ability that she cannot command, so that she can only passively wait for the hints and assist Boku in his journey to find Rat and the sheep, but disappears completely from the story when Boku reaches his destination. The wife in "Where I'm Likely to Find it" and the prostitute in "South Bay Strut" are also like non-player characters in a game, who the protagonist gets a task from or submit a task to, but are ultimately unimportant in the hero's quest.

The female characters of Murakami also seem to lack a voice of their own. It's the natural limitation of a first-person narration from male narrators that the inner psyche of other female characters, or any other characters at all, can rarely be explored. Boku in A Wild Sheep Chase is especially portrayed to have difficulties expressing and noticing emotions, and most of Murakami's other male narrators also seem to only be observant of factual details, such as the brand of clothing or the number of objects, but they rarely make conjectures about the surrounding characters' emotions based on their observance. In chapter 12 of Sputnik Sweetheart and chapter 9 of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, there are two female characters who recount their traumatic experience to the male narrator. Even when it is made clear that the narrator hears the story from the female characters during verbal conversations, neither stories are presented to the readers directly as they were told by the females but rather as a summarized / paraphrased version retold again by the narrator.

- Crystal