Haruki Murakami Writes Good Women. The Problem Is You.

Ajouté : 2026-06-02

[00:00:01]What's up guys? So, you know, I swear there are exactly two types of posts that go up on the Haruki Murakami subreddit.

[00:00:12]One of [snorts] those posts is I'm just getting into Haruki Murakami for the first time and I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore. What should I read next? And just to save you the trouble of having to post that and wait for the exact same inevitable comments that always show up, people are either going to recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or 1Q84. Usually people over 30 recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and people under 30 recommend 1Q84. Just pick one and keep going.

[00:00:42]Anyway, then there's the second type of post, which is a person who feels the need to apologize for being a Haruki Murakami fan because of this horrible way in which he writes women.

[00:00:56]And [snorts] >> [clears throat] >> I've talked about this in a few other videos.

[00:00:59]This is a group delusion. Haruki Murakami does not have a problem writing women.

[00:01:05]What happens is there's they they inevitably are talking about like the same three or four women that show up in some of his major works, these uh certain characters that show up in some of his major works, and ascribing all of the attributes of those characters to all of his characters, his female characters. And what inevitably starts to happen is the word almost starts carrying a lot of water. They say, "Almost all of his characters are like this." That way when you point out the vast pantheon of female characters that absolutely in no way, shape, or form embody this stereotype that they think shows up in Murakami works, they can say, "Well, that's the exception that proves the rule."

[00:01:48]And the way I've I've talked about this before, but the way we got to this point was Haruki Murakami for decades from in the the '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s was a huge hit with the coffee shop jazz club hipster types like myself. And then all of a sudden it what happened is in the early 2010s, for some reason, we all decided that all books, all TV shows, all movies, all any other form of media were supposed to be about exactly one type of person. They were supposed to tell the story of a slightly obese 31-year-old woman with toothpaste-colored hair and a nose ring and who is forever beleaguered by the demands placed on her by the men in her life. And if she has a boyfriend at all, it is he is a a very reserved, shy, milktoast man who looks like Edward Snowden and never in any way, shape, or form indicates that he has any physical desire for her or any woman whatsoever.

[00:02:55]And I don't know why we at that very moment decided we everything had to be like that, but that's what took over all of a sudden. And from that point forward, every Haruki Murakami fan has been made to do penance for this imaginary problem that does not exist in Haruki Murakami's writing if you actually have read his stuff. And you'll notice there on the shelf here and going into the shelf over here is all of Haruki Murakami's books with the only exception being Underground, which I just haven't read yet and doesn't really apply here cuz that's investigative journalism, not a a commentary on men and women and how they relate to each other.

[00:03:38]Anyway, so for today's uh for for today's entry into the people don't know what they're talking about when they criticize the way Murakami writes women.

[00:03:54]Uh somebody posted this thing on r/murakami and it's a it's it's a tweet. Uh somebody retweeted something. So, first there's a tweet from someone named faggot83629031852 who says, "What if prostitutes told you epic science facts?" And someone named Tasha replies and says, "This is how Murakami writes female characters. That one sex worker in Kafka on the Shore who is a philosophy student and quoted Hegel."

[00:04:27]This is what's incredible to me. Like, you are so committed, you know, for decades for decades progressive voices have pushed back on portrayals of women in stories as um as being being limited to uh one-dimensional sex toys. They've pushed back on that time and time again.

[00:04:55]And then a writer comes along and shatters that mold, creates a character that works against that stereotype. In fact, literally works directly against that stereotype by defying the expectations of that type of character.

[00:05:09]And you use that as some kind of evidence of his perversity or his narrow-mindedness.

[00:05:17]You're got It's It's extraordinary. But what's also incredible to me is how you the this person is treating it as abhorrent that a sex worker would would have interests outside and and would have fully realized character interests outside of sex work.

[00:05:39]And here's the thing.

[00:05:42]You know, I give you one example. I have a friend.

[00:05:45]Uh this is a friend of mine who is a former prostitute. I have never paid for her services. I could not have afforded it if I wanted to, but for a for many years she supported herself as a prostitute as a means of putting herself through grad school, and she is now a PhD, a and a professional psychiatrist or psychologist. She works as a psychologist now. And I have had conversations with her about philosophy and psychology and art and culture and all sorts of things.

[00:06:20]It is totally unsurprising to me that that this character that he's created here that the one from Kafka on the Shore that quotes Hegel.

[00:06:33]Yeah.

[00:06:35]I that that that totally does not register as problematic to me at all. I know that that's just one example.

[00:06:43]I know when I I I I've known women who were sex workers who have interests and ideas and thoughts outside of sex work. And it comes to question of like, what do you want?

[00:07:00]Is is this What about, you know, there's for example, you notice on the other side of the shelf is my other favorite Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and you can if you know his work, you can recognize the spines of those as well.

[00:07:15]And Yukio Mishima who had a highly highly traditionalist far-right nationalistic attitude towards things.

[00:07:25]Uh, you know, you read his book Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Temple of the Golden Pavilion is about a Buddhist monk with a severe speech impediment who as such is forced into a life of being an incel, And he eventually decides that he's going to burn down this uh the uh this temple that he works at, the the Golden Pavilion.

[00:07:51]Uh he's going to burn it down, and that's not a giving anything away. It's actually a historical novel based on true events.

[00:07:59]But anyway, there are two prostitute characters in the course of the story. One is a prostitute that comes with uh that comes to the temple. Uh this is around the the time of the initial uh US occupation of Japan after World War II. Uh she comes to the temple with an American soldier who's there uh as a tourist.

[00:08:24]And uh at one point, the uh soldier forces the woman down on the ground and gets our protagonist uh peer pressures her into our protagonist into stomping on her stomach several times.

[00:08:37]Uh and we find out later that the reason he was made to do that is because the woman was carrying the the uh soldier's baby, and he was trying to induce a miscarriage, which he did.

[00:08:48]Uh okay, so that's one prostitute character that shows up. The other prostitute character is this one that our uh incel protagonist goes to to lose his virginity right before he uh burns down the temple towards the end of the book.

[00:09:04]And he goes to this woman, and uh the level of contempt that Mishima has for this woman and the kind of work that she does is palpable from the outset. He describes the woman as being like a street corner, you know, I mean, it's just um and uh she is this uh this this uh vapid, contemptuous, uh condescending condescending but but still idiotic uh woman that exists in the story only to provide the final uh emasculation, symbolic emasculation of this character before he commits to this act of terrorism that he's about to carry out. That's her purpose. He goes to her and uh loses his virginity and then he comes back the next day to see her again, this time with flowers, and he's already for She's already forgotten who he is. And he tell because he's about to burn down the temple, he tells her that she may see him on the news in the next few days. And she just starts busts out laughing cuz she can't imagine anyone that pathetic doing anything worth being on the news for.

[00:10:12]Uh okay, were were those better uh depictions of prostitutes in your mind?

[00:10:17]One as a punching bag and the other as a uh uh the other as this uh kind of the this kind of uh final step in a cycle of social rejection?

[00:10:31]Was that I mean, was that better in your mind or something?

[00:10:36]And that's what's incredible. It's like, you know, you you want these characters uh you we we talk about all of the importance of portraying people from marginalized groups as uh well-rounded, deep, fully complete people and not just symbols for a Occidental male audience to interact with. And then when someone comes along and does that, provides that, you hold that [snorts] against them in contempt.

[00:11:07]It's literally anything The thing is, because this group hallucination has caught on, literally anything any character that Haruki Murakami portrays is either going to be placed in uh a play is either going to be held as confirmation of the group hallucination or in the other category of exceptions that prove the rule. You you know, before this mindset took over in Murakami fandom, you could look at a story like Sleep. You know, Sleep is about a woman who can't sleep, and um she has this husband that is completely inattentive to her needs, uh is only interested in her as a sex object, and that is a central that that relationship or lack thereof between them is a central axis in the story about insomnia.

[00:11:59]And it's kind of like, okay, did I guess you just didn't know read that story? I mean, but before before the Murakami enjoyment embargo was imposed in the early 2010s, you know, countless women read that story and and and enjoyed it, and and it resonated with them, and and you know, I've had conversations with women talking about how much they love how Murakami writes women, how he loves they love how uh how he explores them and gets inside gets inside of what it means to be a woman and that sort of thing.

[00:12:40]And time and again, what happens is people commiserate over the same three or four notable characters from major Haruki Murakami works, and ignore the whole rest of his oeuvre, if I'm saying that correctly. And and we all just kind of are expected to sit there and masturbate ourselves masturbate each other uh commiserating over this a mad totally imaginary problem.

[00:13:07]And even as I was reading the responses to that, you know, if I can find it right quick, um >> You know, even a sympathetic respondent says, "Murakami's women aren't very realistic, but they're memorable, so I like reading some of them. Also, a bit disingenuous to demand realistic female characters in a novel where all the male characters are monsters or autistic savants who talk to cats, isn't it?"

[00:13:49]And um then uh someone says, "But also, should we really be expecting / encouraging one-dimensional portrayals of female sex workers? Like, yeah, Murakami is awkward and clunky when writing about women, but I'd rather he keep trying to show sex workers as people with complex lives like everyone else instead of falling into lazy tropes that sex workers have no lives or interests outside of their job. Like, a bad attempt is better than no attempt, right?"

[00:14:17]And then it goes The next person responds, "I think it plays into Murakami's fixation on sex workers as exotic beings who live at the edge of our everyday reality. It's kind of a sexist fixation, and it still doesn't fully uh really fully humanize these women, but definitely preferable to seeing prostitutes as empty-headed and treating them with disgust, like what I mentioned with the Mishima novel."

[00:14:39]It's It's like God.

[00:14:43]Again, what do what does he Stop and think about the Do you even understand the material you're reading?

[00:14:51]When you read uh stories like Kafka on the Shore, stories like Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, stories like Dance Dance Dance, stories where these kind of relationships happen, you are taught you are reading stories told from the perspective of men who are very isolated loners.

[00:15:16]This is solitude and isolation is a recurring theme in Haruki Murakami's writing.

[00:15:26]And men who are solitary, isolated loners do not meet people and form connections in normal, everyday, traditional, above-board, obvious ways because if they could do that, they would not be isolated, solitary loners in the first place.

[00:15:52]And so what happens is you have these stories where an isolated, lonely man forms a genuine connection with a prostitute who is herself an isolated, lonely person despite the nature of her job. And when these two people form this connection and start getting to know each other, instead of reading it as these are two lost souls who are forming an unusual connection with one another because they're incapable of doing that in their normal day to everyday day-to-day lives, you read it as "Oh my god, I bet when he looks at women his peepee points up and that means he's a misogynist."

[00:16:36]I I don't get me wrong. I enjoyed Sputnik Sweetheart. I enjoyed South of the Border, East of the Sun, but you can't deny that his peepee probably points up when he looks at women.

[00:16:49]God, I mean it is so it is it is so [ __ ] insane. Like right now I'm reading this book, Everything in Color by Stephanie Stalvey. It's a graphic novel about her experiences growing up in an extremely puritanical form of Christianity and how her commitment to that was shattered when she met the love of her life and they fell in love and got married. It is a beautiful story. It is a fascinating story. But I What what happens I'm at the point I'm at right now in the story uh they are just at this Halloween party uh where they're they've been interacting with each other as just college students and friends for a long time and they interact they they finally at this college party come to a point where they can't go on anymore and they just have to confess that they have feelings for one another. And they've been hanging out with each other for weeks and weeks on end and both of them have been feeling something for each other and they were afraid to say something and they finally did and now they're finally in love.

[00:18:00]This is a true story and I'm sitting here reading it and thinking I I'm enjoying this. This is a true story. I believe that it's a true story.

[00:18:10]I don't think she's lying to me.

[00:18:12]But this is not how I this woman is slightly younger than me and she experienced this normal existence, this normal life.

[00:18:25]And it is this this kind of thing where two people get to know each other and they build up mutual attraction for each other and eventually decide that they like each other romantically or admit that they like each other romantically after spending enough time to get you know, time together as friends does not exist in my life at all.

[00:18:55]I I don't know it's it's I live in a world where women take offense constantly for everything and I have I have I have female friends, very good female friends, male and female friends, but I would say my friend group is probably 60% women.

[00:19:15]But amazingly, the only way that I'm able to have those friendships is by absolutely never broaching the subject of romantic involvement with any of them.

[00:19:25]I I always always always always go into every relationship with a woman thinking, this woman is only interested is in me as a friend, absolutely do not think about her as anything else.

[00:19:43]Because what what I've my experience in things like this is you know, hey, we've been you know, we've been hanging out for a while and I want you to know I have feelings for you. The response I get to that is you have feelings for me?

[00:20:08]Yeah, I mean Okay.

[00:20:15]All this time we've been hanging out?

[00:20:22]And you just you had feelings for me and you didn't you didn't say anything? You didn't you you Well, I was trying to see if I mean I was just trying to gauge whether or not you were interested, too.

[00:20:36]Okay, I I need to go. I'm I'm sorry. I'm That's that's my experience. Like you try to do something totally that you think is totally normal and people respond in these bizarre nonsensical ways and it's because in the real normal people world, like I walk into the room and something happens.

[00:21:00]Like, you know, I I I walk into the room, I have a pleasant rapport with a woman and Uh, my knowledge, my face goes because I have a problem with facial tics and that immediately disqualifies me as a mating partner in her mind or something. I don't know.

[00:21:17]But uh, they but, you know, it it as soon as I'm just completely instantly out the door. Something happens and I'm I'm out the door. I'm wearing a Bob's Burgers T-shirt right now. There is probably some unwritten rule among women that if you like Bob's Burgers, that means um, you want to uh, take a a golf club and shove it up a woman's ass and uh, and and and it's it's only your latent white supremacy that's making you feel you making you think that that's morally acceptable or something and that was something that everybody else on the internet decided was a thing completely without my knowledge and I was just sitting here enjoying Bob's Burgers or something like that.

[00:22:01]This whacko bonkers nonsensical world that normal people occupy is just a a strange ethereal confusing realm to me. And that's what's weird. It's like I I keep, you know, on various autism support groups that I'm on I go to people, you know, the people say, "What's what's something about being autistic that you learned that no one ever told you it was going to happen?" And I say, "Feeling like I'm the only one in the room who understands basic cause and effect."

[00:22:34]Like I took this course of action for this logical reason and now people are mad at me because, you know, it's just this strange language that normal people speak that I it's just completely beyond me. It's like um, my my, you know, my girlfriend's second cousin died and she was crying about it. So, I said, uh, "I'm oh, Look, babe, you know, hey, babe, I'm here for you. Just I'm I'm here whatever you need. Just let me know how I can help. And she got up and cried started crying harder and got up and went in the bedroom and slammed the door and I don't know why she's mad at me. And my neurotypical friend says, "Well, dude, did you tell her that her breasts look like two kumquats covered in extra virgin olive oil?"

[00:23:24]"No, why would I do that?" "Dude, everybody knows that when a girl someone in a girl's extended family dies, the first thing you do to help her through the grieving process is tell her that her breasts look like two kumquats covered in extra virgin olive oil."

[00:23:40]"Are you some kind of misogynist incel or something?"

[00:23:44]And this is the bizarro world that neurotypical people occupy.

[00:23:49]And so I am very very comfortable forming these connections with strange and unusual people on the outer edges of society.

[00:24:00]Because they they like me are bemused with a sort of Daria Morgendorffer like countenance at the sheer bizarre stupidity of mainstream culture.

[00:24:12]And that is what is happening to those Murakami characters. That's what's happening there. And for some reason you, the people who feel the need to genuflect towards this imaginary problem, are playing into that. Every time I got the last time I commented on this, one person wrote in and said, "I mean, you're right, he's not an incel, but I I don't know. I just I was really bothered by the way he wrote about incest in Kafka on the Shore and it makes me wonder about as they I think they said something about like it makes me wonder like what he's actually into kind of bothered me and all that." And it's like, "Okay, stop a minute. Did you know Did you know that it is possible to read a work of fiction and analyze it as a work of fiction and not as a manifesto on what the author themselves is advocating for in the sexual realm in reality?

[00:25:19]Did you know you can do that? Did you know that Vladimir Nabokov is not actually a pedophile?

[00:25:28]I mean, and and over and okay, the the thing the incest theme in Kafka on the Shore people keep saying, well, it keeps going to this thing that he must be some kind of uh he he he this must be perversion on his part or something like that. Dude, do you understand? Are you culturally literate enough to understand that Kafka on the Shore is a modern-day retelling of the Oedipus myth?

[00:25:57]He kills his father, runs away from home, and [ __ ] his mother. It's a retelling of the Oedipus myth.

[00:26:05]And the Oedipus myth is this is not some bizarre aberration.

[00:26:12]This is actually something that is very symbolically very central to the human experience.

[00:26:19]The Oedipal complex is a part of psychoanalysis that people have to work through.

[00:26:26]That the idea that young men that men symbolically in the course of their growing up and taking on their own sexual personae symbolically kill their fathers and symbolically [ __ ] their mothers is something that is at the heart of Freudian psychoanalysis. And granted, Freud's ideas were far from perfect and had to be expanded upon, and it was really his successors that did the actual innovations, but that's this very base level concept. You know, the Doors in the in the song The End, the that song has a whole middle section where Jim Morrison does a spoken word retelling of the Oedipus myth.

[00:27:09]And somehow people didn't listen to that. People listen to that, they didn't come away with it thinking, "Okay, like I really like the song, but I don't like that he's advocating for incest. Like I just He really obviously has problems of his own." Okay, here's what's happening when you do that.

[00:27:30]Here is what's happening when you read a work of fiction and you take the controversial parts and write them off as some sort of personality flaw for the that the creator is having.

[00:27:45]That's you. That is [clears throat] your mind putting up a a shield, putting up a defense against having to actually contemplate the profundity of what you just read.

[00:27:56]You read something that makes you uncomfortable, you attribute that to lechery and perversion and incel vibes or whatever on the part of the author, and now you don't have to actually sit there and confront what you were just presented with.

[00:28:12]Now you don't have to sit there and think, "Gosh, what is this saying to me?

[00:28:16]What do I What Why am I reacting to it this way? What do I need to confront within myself? What is this springing forth in me?" You don't have to do any of those things that are at the heart of the experience of appreciating art in general. You don't have to do any of those things now because you can write it all off as lechery on the part of the creator.

[00:28:37]Now you're protected from having to look into your own shadow and see what's in there.

[00:28:42]Because you wrote it off as the character as the creator being some kind of uh uh some kind of closeted scumbag.

[00:28:54]>> [sighs] >> Again, it comes back to yes, he is very interested in telling the stories of highly highly isolated highly intelligent male loners. Yeah.

[00:29:10]That is a very that is undeniably a recurring theme in his work.

[00:29:14]And how those type of men relate to women is going to be atypical.

[00:29:21]It would not be good character development for those type of characters if their the way that ways they relate to women were not atypical.

[00:29:31]But this constant constant incessant apologizing and and this constant need that we're expect we're all expected to circle jerk because Haruki Murakami again does not write uh characters who are a slightly obese 31-year-old woman with toothpaste colored hair and a nose ring who's who are forever beleaguered by the demands of the men in their lives and have a boyfriend that looks like Edward Snowden and never gives any indication that he's sexually or romantically interested in her or any other woman.

[00:30:05]Because he won't do that.

[00:30:09]Because he won't do that, you you have to entertain this group hallucination that he can't write good female characters or something like that.

[00:30:22]And if I'm wrong about that, then I challenge you to this. I challenge you this.

[00:30:29]Tell me.

[00:30:31]I'm not talking to you.

[00:30:34]Tell me.

[00:30:36]Tell me the one correct way. Tell me the correct way for a male author to describe the physical beauty of a woman in a way that preserves him as a decent member of society and not as some sort of vile pathetic misfit.

[00:30:58]What is it?

[00:31:00]Tell me the objectively correct way to to describe attractive eyes, attractive lips, attractive ears, attractive unattractive neckline, attractive breasts, attractive buttocks, attractive hips, legs. Tell me the right way to the objectively correct way to describe those things that does not immediately brand the man as a vile scumbag.

[00:31:26]Tell me the right way to describe a woman's interior world, her thoughts and ideas that and and correctly and fully encapsulate her as a person. Tell me the objectively correct way to do that that preserves the male author as a decent human being and not and does not castigate him as some sort of social misfit.

[00:31:54]Because I'll be honest with you.

[00:31:56]The reason I one of the reasons Murakami's writing appeals to me is because I am one of those men who is a social misfit. I obviously am one of those men who is a social misfit and it made me feel comforted to have a author who could explore the internal thought processes of men like myself so that I don't feel like I'm just randomly casting about in the strange bizarre ether of the world failing to understand it. Believe it or not, I was I was attracted to the writing of an author who seemed to capture how I was feeling. Imagine that.

[00:32:38]And finally, you know, you have this author who gives you this language for what it's for what it's like to be in the interior world, the deeply cerebral interior world of a highly intelligent male loner.

[00:32:51]And you have this you you have this author who's encapsulating this experience well, that's resonating with you, that makes you feel like maybe you're not such a crazy freak after all.

[00:33:02]Would you stop that?

[00:33:05]Makes you feel like you're not such a crazy freak after all.

[00:33:09]And then all of a sudden uh this memo was apparently passed around among his fan base that says, "Oh, by the way, uh we're all supposed to pretend we're pieces of [ __ ] for liking his writing."

[00:33:24]God.

[00:33:29]Anyway, I will follow up with you on what I think of everything in color because I really am enjoying it and it is a really beautiful book. And um I I wish there were some economic system where graphic novels didn't cost massive amounts of money, but I understand why.