Acts of Recognition: On

the Women Characters of

Haruki Murakami
Mieko Kawakami Considers the Work of One of the
World's Great Novelists

By Mieko Kawakami

October 3, 2019

Imagine being a young girl, growing up in a Japanese city. No one else in

your family is a reader. You have to find books on your own. Where do
you start? You go to the school library. Under “Literature,” you find
Japan’s best-known writers—Akutagawa, Soseki, Dazai, Mishima—and a
few big names from other parts of the world—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
Camus, Sartre, Steinbeck. It’ll be years before you come across names like
Virginia Woolf, Yuko Tsushima or Susan Sontag. As you stand in the
stacks of the school library, scanning the spines one by one, you don’t
even recognize that none of the names belongs to a woman.
When I was in my early teens, I spotted the name Haruki Murakami on the
spine of a relatively new book. It was already a name that one would find
in every bookstore or library, no matter the size. I took the book out and
opened it up. I remember feeling like I’d never read anything quite like it.
No parents, no family, no soporific preaching, none of the self-conscious
struggles or triumphs so common in literature. For me, bogged down by
situations and circumstances I had never opted into, Murakami’s
individualism was shocking. More than anything, I felt like I could have
read any given page forever—the writing was overwhelmingly fantastic.
What made it fantastic had nothing to do with gender, the author’s or my
own. I’ll never forget how excited I was to find out that novels like this
existed. From then on, Murakami was a very special writer to me.
Murakami’s narratives tend to follow a pattern. A lonesome protagonist
ventures into another world to recover something he has lost. We’re
repeatedly shown that what we see, what we believe to be reality, has a
shadow to it, and by passing through a “well” that unexpectedly appears in
our daily life, our existence can easily be thrown into an unfamiliar place.
The stories delve seamlessly into worlds that almost feel constructed from
a grammar of the unconscious, realms where the reader may access forms
of healing and regeneration only found therein.
When you’re reading, immersed in a story, you can become a point of
view. It’s a beautiful thing, but the moment you take your eyes off the
page, there you are, stuck in reality again. You’re back in your own body,
burdened by time and an array of other constraints. As if this weren’t
enough, most women are beset with the additional burden of often feeling
out of place simply for being a woman. Because we live in these bodies,
we are desired, ascribed value and consumed. We are told who and what to
be, and we internalize these things, often without realizing it. The world of
stories ought to be a place where anything is possible, but more often than
not we run into the same old pressures, reinforcing their effect. If you look
for women in fiction, you’ll find them everywhere—novels, movies, and
of course in anime, perhaps Japan’s main cultural export—but they are
almost always assigned supporting roles, sexualized and self-sacrificing. It
doesn’t matter how young or old the woman is, it would seem she has no
choice but to walk one of two paths: the mother or the whore.
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

*
I’ve had numerous chances to talk with people about Murakami’s work
over the years. I’ve spoken to scholars, translators, authors and readers,
both in and outside Japan. I’ve heard them speak passionately about their
experiences with Murakami and try to find the words to explain the
peculiar charm of his stories. We’ve discussed the themes and styles he’s
developed over the past 40 years. We’ve talked about how those elements
have changed—and how they’ve stayed the same. Then, about ten years
ago, men and women alike started asking one question with particular
urgency: “How do you feel about Murakami’s representation of women?”
The question had such gravity that it was impossible to ignore. Answers
ran the gamut. Some wished that he would handle women with the same
creativity that he summoned when writing about men (or wells). Some
said “The women make themselves unreasonably available,” while others
said “I don’t see anything wrong with this.” Meanwhile, some said they
actually thought Murakami’s depictions of women were realistic—even
convincing.
Then they would turn to me and ask: “What do you think?”
I understand what’s at stake. Among the true pleasures of reading a tale
spun by Murakami is the way he makes the world we know a foreign
place. Oftentimes, sex functions as a skeleton key, allowing his
protagonists access to other worlds. As these protagonists are
overwhelmingly heterosexual and male, women must take on the role of
sexual accomplice. I recognize that this pattern is present in no small
number of his works, and I can understand that there is something to be
learned from paying attention to this pattern. But what can we actually
understand from this sort of pattern? The author’s personal ethics,
obsessions, or attitude toward the world? Does it speak to something in his
work obscured beneath the surface? All of the above? When we uncover
these patterns, how does that substantively transform the thing we’ve read?

What is it that I, or you, for that matter, encounter on

the personal level when reading Murakami?
There are things that we can glean from patterns we discover, and things
these patterns fail to explain. In other words, there are things we can share
about our reading experience and things too personal to convey. The joys
of reading are innumerable, but what makes it possible at all is the fact that
the act of reading, as a practice, is deeply personal. When reading, we
encounter things so deeply personal we could never share them with
anyone else. I’ve said a little about one of the patterns found in
Murakami’s fiction. So, what is it that I, or you, for that matter, encounter
on the personal level when reading Murakami?
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

*
Let’s think about the women in Murakami’s fiction. Who is the first that
comes to mind? Midori from Norwegian Wood? Aomame
from 1Q84? May Kasahara from Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?
For me, it’s the narrator of “Sleep,” one of Murakami’s finest short stories.
“Sleep” was published in Japan in 1989. Jay Rubin’s English translation
was published three years later in The New Yorker. “Sleep” begins with
the narrator’s 17th day of inexplicable sleeplessness. She’s a housewife in
her thirties. She’s married to a dentist and has a young son. On the surface,
it looks like her life is going pretty well. She’s simply unable to sleep. It’s
been more than two weeks, and—strangely—no one else has noticed.
Slipping back and forth between recollection and the present moment, she
reads Anna Karenina through the night. Time ticks by relentlessly. The
air grows thinner and thinner as we drift ever closer to the “other side,” no
turning back.
Importantly, the narrator’s loneliness isn’t some female version of the
feeling. What this story depicts is an inexpressible human loneliness, a
despair in which something erosive awaits us, here in our quiet lives with
our intimates, with our aging bodies and memories—though no one knows
when it will come. What it depicts is not a stock female loneliness or
hopelessness, the kind women are used to identifying with, through
sympathy and familiarity, because they can see themselves. This human
loneliness, relayed to us through a strange tension that won’t let up for a
second, moots the fact that the narrator is a woman. Yes, because women
are people. The narrator of this story was the first woman in fiction I could
truly recognize as a person. She is still a part of me today, as is her waking
loneliness. To be honest, I was shocked that this woman was written by a
man. Reading “Sleep” also helped me fully understand how characters are
realized in fiction. This is a decisive element in my personal experience
with reading Murakami.
*
The relationship between the works of Murakami and his readers is
fascinating. People across the world, coming from different historical and
cultural backgrounds, identifying with different genders and belonging to
different generations, read Murakami’s work. Quite a few of those readers
have picked him up and never put him down again. Hovering, sometimes
wobbling, between those shareable critiques and unshareable personal
experiences, we continue reading, even as we feel the earth beneath us
shift. I’m certain that increased attention to these moments of discomfort
will motivate a great deal of spirited criticism in the coming years, not just
of novels but across the world of art.
The narrator of “Sleep” was the first woman in fiction I could truly
recognize as a person.
Over the past few years, some people have started asking if it is even
possible anymore for us to read, or write for that matter, without being
aware of gender norms. As a reader and a writer, I think this is a wonderful
thing. By casting a work in a subtly different light, criticism—when it’s at
its best—reveals shadows and depth, and shows readers new possibilities
in the work.
Stories aren’t ads. They aren’t textbooks, either. The fundamental
principle of fiction is that the author writes however they please, and—no
less importantly—the reader reads the work however they please.
Sometimes novels are used to justify a certain ideology. Even that kind of
reading is fair. We just need to recognize that there is no single standard
by which all works ought to be evaluated. The possibilities are infinite.
Feminist criticism is one such possibility—one among many—but one that
offers insights not otherwise available.
There is no general rule about what makes a novel wonderful or dull, only
the wonderfulness or dullness pursued by or contained within each unique
piece of fiction. We need to accept this, savor it, process it—on a
fundamental level, reading inheres an act of trust, between the reader and
the work, or the reader and the writer.
Sometimes, when you’re oscillating between critical questioning and
personal experience, but go on reading the work of a certain author,
something comes to exist between you and the story. Call it trust, between
you and the work, impossible to share with anyone else. For me, “Sleep”
and its narrator stand at the center of my relationship with Murakami.
Even more than that, it’s the way he writes, which will always remain as
vibrant to me as it was when I first read him in my teens. That writing that
Murakami pours everything into, and continues to evolve with each new
work.
But what about you? How has a sense of trust formed between you and
Murakami’s work? What shape has it taken, and how does it speak to you?
How does it exist inside of you?
–translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd