Always Sensual, But Never The Self: Beyond the Objectification of Haruki Murakami's Female Characters

Abstract

Japanese author Haruki Murakami, known for his novels dealing with identity, existentialism, and magical realism, is also notorious for his exaggerated sexualization of his female characters. Although female characters are narratively essential parts to most of his works, many of them, regardless of age, personality, or role, are subjected to gratuitous sex scenes and objectification. This thesis examines the complexity of these female characters in relation to and beyond their sexualization, focusing on several female characters across a variety of Murakami’s works and breaking down how Murakami gives them agency, develops them as proper characters, and also how he constantly returns to sexualization despite all that. The primary subject works examined are Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and Men Without Women. Using tropes and archetypes from Western literature, psychoanalysis, and Japanese literature, this thesis explores how Murakami disrupts and subverts certain expectations of women in literature, creating female characters that rival the male protagonists in intrigue, power, and personality, but it also examines the inseparability of the female body from sexual pleasure, regardless of the character. The theory of male gaze and voyeurism serves as a useful tool in determining the agency and objectification of the female characters, especially when female characters occupy more active roles and male characters occupy more passive ones. This thesis also brings Japanese author Mieko Kawakami into conversation in order to compare the construction of female characters by a male author in a male-centric narrative with those written by a female author in a female-centric narrative. In this discussion, I hope to explain what makes Murakami’s writing so intriguing yet simultaneously frustrating from a feminist perspective. Although Murakami writes female characters beyond strict trope and archetype, the persistent sexualization for the sake of pure gratification makes his writing feel like “two steps forward, one step back” in terms of the progress and potential these characters could be making.