Female Characters in Murakami's Work

From the girlfriend with a ravishing ear to Miu's self-splitting to the death of the female protagonist of Drive My Car, it is clear that females in Murakami's works share similar characteristics. To start, perhaps the most revealing about Murakami's own views about female characters is revealed in an interview he had conducted by Mieko Kawakami, a female novelist who Murakami admires and has written about her influence on his novels. Mieko tells Haruki, "it’s common for my female friends to say to me, 'If you love Haruki Murakami’s work so much, how do you justify his portrayal of women?' The notion being that there’s something disconcerting about the depiction of women in your stories. It irks some people, men and women alike. A common reading is that your male characters are fighting their battles unconsciously, on the inside, leaving the women to do the fighting in the real world." To this question, Murakami asks many follow-up questions, particularly the ones which denote that his writing have reduced females to sexual partners and agents of fate. 

Murakami responds that in many cases, his female characters are gateways or opportunities for transformation. In my opinion, Murakami provides a subpar answer in not directly responding to the element of misogyny. He states that "I don't think any of my characters are that complex. The focus is on the interface, or how these people, both men and women, engage with the world they're living in. If anything, I take great care not to dwell too much on the meaning of existence, its importance or its implications... I'm not interested in individualistic characters." Mieko pressed on with the common interpretation that the blood of the female is shed for the sake of self-realization of the male protagonist. Granted the pattern does not appear in every single work written by Murakami but this is apparent in many. For instance, the loss of the girlfriend from the mountain in A Wild Sheep Chase, the death of Oto in Drive My Car, Kumiko killing Noboru and pays the final price in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the death of the wife in Tony Takitani. A common feminist reading suggests that it is exhausting to see the repetitive pattern of how women are sacrificed for the sake of men's self-realization or sexual desire. Haruki denies using females as novelist instruments and states that "to be honest, I don't understand this idea about there being any kind of pattern. We can talk about the women in my novels as a group, but to me, they’re unique individuals, and on a fundamental level, before I see them as a man or woman, I see them as a human being." 

Based on this interview, Murakami clarifies that if this interpretation of a pattern of females exist in his stories, he never intended it. He also claims, on the basis of his intention of constructing unique individualists, that female characters as a group cannot be interpreted. Despite his clarifications, I believe that a pattern is apparent of female characters being connected to specific or general sexual desires (girlfriend's ear) and represented as agents of fate. They are more likely than male protagonists to die/disappear in Murakami's storyline which ultimately leads to some type of impact on the male characters. Whether or not intentionality was behind the pattern, we cannot dismiss the contemporary feminist reading of Murakami's female characters. 

Source: https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/

Yiqin Zhang