The Worst Opinion in Literature
If there’s one thing I absolutely can’t stand about talking to the literature community, it’s listening to their opinions on Haruki Murakami, and why they think he is a terrible author. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t like. The beauty of art is that there are different strokes for different folks. Each genre has its giants, and there is no one that you are required to like.
But sometimes, criticism on an author (or any creator for that matter) can venture into the absurd. A while back, I wrote a blog about pulling books from shelves, and argued why it’s not only a bad idea, but it’s also eventually harmful to the community as a whole. Sometimes, a prolific writer might hold a belief that you disagree with, or even that you might find morally reprehensible. H. P. Lovecraft was famously argued for the preservation of race and culture, and in many of his works, his anglo-centric views were on full display. Similarly here in Japan, Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s literary giants, was so embroiled in the far-right that he attempted a coup to reinstate the Emperor of Japan, and committed ritual seppuku.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and defend either of these beliefs. If either of these men had been my contemporaries, it would have been a great challenge to get along with them. But that’s not the point. One of my favorite philosophers and historical role-models is Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome from 161-180 AD. During his reign, he fought wars of expansion, continued the practice of slavery, and most certainly held views that many today would find rather unpleasant. A man is not defined by a single trait or action, yet for some reason once someone is outed as a bigot or some-such, there are many who are quick to wash their hands of any association, and will actively denounce anything and everything with even a remote tie to that individual.
Enter Haruki Murakami, author of some of the most well-written and culturally significant novels of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Nothing will ever come close to the feeling I got in college reading “Kafka on the Shore” for the first time, or sitting in my car on my lunch breaks at work flipping through “After Dark” as furiously as I could. Murakami is well known for blending reality with mysticism in his works, creating diverse stories that range from the completely mundane and ordinary (Norwegian Wood) to the absolutely wild and insane (IQ84).
After that long-winded intro about the politics of writers and philosophers and the relationship of said beliefs to their art, you’d be forgiven if you thought I was about to drop some kind of fact-bomb about Mr. Murakami. Like he was a secret member of a cult or maybe a closet communist seeking to revive the Soviet Union. But no, Murakami is not some flagrant racist, sexist, war-monger, or “phobe”. Yet people in the west seem really divided on their opinions of him and his work.
So, I did what I usually do. I poked the hornets nest in a writing community with a book recommendation, and almost instantly got the response I was looking for. “…A lot of Murakami has some really blatant “men writing women” material in it, so be aware…”
My curiosity peaked, I started to look into other Japanese Literature communities for opinions, and was surprised how almost every conversation turned to one scene of one book, the dream-like sex scene between Tengo and Fuka-Eri in IQ84. For the uninitiated, the girl in this scene is underage—17 I believe—and the scene has almost a comedy to the way it was written. I haven’t re-read the book in several years, and sadly I left my copy in America so I couldn’t grab it and look it up, but suffice it to say that I can see why this scene would make some people feel uncomfortable, even though it’s meant to be an almost spiritual event in the context of the story.
And so, because of this one scene, now there exists a cacophony of voices who simply MUST let the people know what awful underlying sexism exists in Murakami novels, and that you must be WARNED before you dive into them, lest your fragile mind be hurt.
I hate the internet.
It saddens me to think that people have been discouraged from reading Murakami’s works because of loud-mouthed whiners who think that if a character doesn’t check a certain amount of boxes, then that character is no good and by extension the author must be signaling something of his inner biases or even hatreds through them. Keep in mind, this is the same author, who, in the SAME NOVEL has a leading female whose job is to assassinate abusive husbands and sexual predators. This is the author who in a notoriously insular country like Japan, dared to have a trans character be one of the strongest, most stalwart allies of the protagonist in “Kafka on the Shore”.
Sadly, these moments and characters get completely drowned in the sea of rage and bullshit that flows through literary groups like radioactive sludge.
So, if there’s one thing I want to say here, it’s this. If you want to read something, read it. Don’t listen to random ass internet clowns who hide in their little safety-boxes and never leave. Books are one of the greatest means of bettering yourself and coming to terms with ideas, both valorous and vile. Read more, and read often!
-C
