A Critique of a Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels

I was looking forward to reading the interview between Murakami and Mieko Kawakami because, like Kawakami, I’ve had concerns about the roles that women-aligned characters play in Murakami’s novels. However, I was disappointed with both Murakami’s responses and Kawakami’s questions.

When discussing the protagonist of Sleep, Murakami said he “wrote the character to be a human being, without really being conscious of her as a woman.” This “gender blindness”—a term used to describe treating all genders the same regardless of the roles and responsibilities placed upon different genders by society—is harmful and ignorant. The logic behind being “gender blind” when writing characters as a way to avoid prejudice is that if you do not even consider gender, you cannot write in a biased manner. However, what’s actually happening is ignorance to the experiences that gender minorities face and an unwillingness to acknowledge the gender-based discrimination that occurs. It also fails to acknowledge the gendering of language itself, and by describing characters through written text, this act of passing through language creates meaning that's constrained by current hegemonic systems of oppression and stereotyping.

Additionally, regardless of whether Murakami is conscious of his portrayal of women or not, his implicit gender biases are at work when he’s writing. He refuses to take an introspective look at those socially-constructed ideas of gender roles that have been ingrained in him by society. There's an obvious pattern of women in Murakami’s novels being used by male protagonists to cure their loneliness through sex. In addition, there is obvious sexual objectification and judgement of women’s bodies by men. Here's an example from Norwegian Wood:

“Almost a year had gone by since I had last seen Naoko, and in that time she had lost so much weight as to look like a different person...There was something natural and serene about the way she had slimmed down, as if she had been hiding in some long, narrow space until she herself had become long and narrow. And a lot prettier than I remembered” (p. 17).

Especially considering that she lost so much weight due to her depression after her boyfriend died, this emphasis that Toru found Naoko more attractive after losing weight was utterly uncalled for. It also feeds into the stereotype that being “skinny” or underweight is inherently more beautiful, natural, and healthy than people with different body types, which is definitely not the case here considering that Naoko was malnourished and struggling with her mental health.

I also feel as though Kawakami’s praise of Sleep is unwarranted, as this story plays into several stereotypes and in the end, Watashi still ends up trapped by society and men (in one scene, literally, as she’s being shaken violently in her car by two men). She’s the classic stay-at-home mom who cooks, cleans, does the laundry, does the grocery shopping, etc. and her “freedom” and breaking free from these gender roles is reading a book, eating chocolate, and drinking brandy. This seventeen-day experience seems more like a break from reality than actual self-liberation or empowerment because Watashi does not sleep the whole time, which is entirely unrealistic and inapplicable to actual women, and also because it is short-lived. There's no real character-development or significant situational change for Watashi afterwards.

Ultimately, almost all of the women-aligned characters in Murakami’s books are established and valued based on their relationships with men, with their lives, thoughts, feelings, and experiences being viewed through the lens of the cisheterosexual male gaze, or what Laura Mulvey describes as fascination with the human form: “the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other” (835). Indeed, the women are subjected not just to the male gazes of their fellow characters (usually male protagonists) but also Murakami himself, who by placing his own (conscious, or as he insists, unconscious) beliefs and desires about women onto these characters while writing them.

The male gaze can often be seen through the aforementioned descriptions of women’s bodies and fixation on the sexualization of women’s bodies, with the male protagonists projecting “[their] phantasy on to the [passive] female figure which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey, 837). The fact that Murakami does not even acknowledge the ways in which cishetero-patriarchy impacts the gendering of language and women’s experiences erases the very real implications of these interlocking systems of oppression, leaving women-aligned characters to be the passive recipients of the male gaze: an object to be consumed and discarded for the self-advancement of the male protagonist. 

- Christa

Citations

“A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself.” Translated by David April Boyd and Sam Bett, Literary Hub, 8 May 2020

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44