Recently finished Murakami”s “Norwegian Wood” and I found the criticisms of the book to range from overblown to completely unfounded- why are people so prudish about sex?

I have a lot of thoughts about this novel, but first I want to preface this by saying that I understand where the critics are coming from, especially when considering Murakami's overall body of work. Even as someone who defends how he writes sex and women it's still not perfect for me either and I can see what the flaws are that people refer to.

Norwegian Wood had so much controversy around it that I was expecting it to be so much worse than it actually was. Murakami is consistently a supremely horny author, so I was surprised when a book criticized for writing all the women as sex objects was significantly less horny and problematic than "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle." There was a lot of sex in the novel, but it was never treated as sex in and of itself, and the female characters were never treated only as sex objects.

What I think is interesting mostly is two points of criticism:

1) "The female side characters are not fleshed out and come off as shallow"

and

2) "The female characters are poorly written vis a vis sex and the novel as a whole sexually objectifies women."

I don't think wither of these are true at all, but what's interesting for me about the first point is that I really don't see how it matters either way. Norwegian Wood is very clearly the exploration of one confused, depressed, and disaffected young man trying to grow up and learn who he is in a specific place and time. The novel is marketed as a love story, and it is, but it's mostly a coming of age story. I don't see why the side characters need to be fleshed out and I have no issue with the side characters being used as mirrors for Toru's own personal growth. Of course the side characters, and the women, all revolve around Toru, he is the center of the story, he's the protagonist of the book, things happen to him.

And that aside, I didn't find that Midori/Naoko/Reiko were egregiously shallow (Reiko is on thin ice though for real). Naoko certainly comes off as shallow and uninteresting, but that's completely intentional I think. This leads me to another point that I've never seen anyone bring up in regards to this novel, which is that Toru is an unreliable narrator. Toru consistently over romanticizes things, understates his feelings, and lies about how much he hurts/cares to himself and to the reader. Naoko isn't shallow, she's emotionally distant and disturbed and Toru is obsessed with her. We learn so little about her because Toru genuinely knows so little about her and yet cares enormously anyways. It's stupid and irrational but it makes sense because he's a kid and he'll figure it out. Midori is criticized for being a typical "pixie manic dream girl" (also like Naoko? This comparison has always been insane to me; Naoko is not a MPDG). And while I can completely see how Midori is exactly that, I don't think it's a problem for the book or character. I think that this criticism, like many criticisms of this novel, are moreso meta-critiques of Murakami the man and his overall body of work rather than this one novel itself. Midori is certainly a repetitive character if you've read May Kasahara or any of the other similar women Murakami has written in his other works, but looking at NW in isolation she's very unique. Especially considering that her whole character seems to be pushing against norms around women of a certain class. I don't know anything about Japanese culture in the 1960s, but I know that generally Japan is regarded as being restrictive and sexually regressive, so if there was any sort of 60s counter culture movement in the East then it's easy to follow how a person like Midori would have actually been super subversive, especially in comparison to the all the "normal" girls that Toru bounces off of, like Hatsumi's friends.

For the second point: "The female characters are poorly written vis a vis sex and the novel as a whole sexually objectifies women."

This criticism is kind of bizarre to me in the context of the book. The whole book directly goes against sexualization in favor of genuine romantic relationships, everything Toru does with Nagasawa is meant to be disgusting and immoral and it directly contrasts with the purity of his experience visiting Naoko. When Toru has mindless sex with drunk girls he isn't thinking of their bodies or their sex- he's thinking about how gross he feels. Compare this to how he describes Naoko's naked body in such a heavenly manner and it's like night and day. This isn't even subtext, Reiko, Hatsumi, and Toru himself all say similar things outright.

The next thought I had is that I feel like this criticism itself is actually pretty misogynistic. How come writing sexually active women who have one night stands and want to explore their sexuality is a bad thing but writing similar male characters is no problem? Why isn't Nagasawa criticized as much, or Toru himself? I think a lot of people put so much emphasis on sex, and put female sexuality especially, on such a pedestal that any treatment of it feels wrong. To me this comes across as more of a personal issue than one with the book. Sex is an important part of our lives, especially for coming of age, so to write characters in this age cohort that fuck like rabbits doesn't come off as unrealistic or as sexualizing at all to me. Sex is worth writing about, but simultaneously it isn't sacred. When we criticize how Murakami wrote Naoko/Midori vis a vis sex then it's kinda like saying that that is the most important thing about them when it isn't, and it treats female sexuality as something to be policed which historically it has been.

This idea is also so weird to me because it is so clear in the Novel that Toru is haunted by and focused on not his sexual relationship with Naoko/Midori, but by his emotional connection to them. He is obsessed with Naoko because he feels obligation to her and because on some level he associates leaving her with leaving Kizuki. Simultaneously he understates his feelings for Midori because he is afraid of opening up and being emotionally close with someone again.

The book has a lot of sex in it, but the sex itself is always treated as vaguely unsatisfying and unimportant compared to genuine intimacy. The female characters have a lot of sex, and are talked about in sexual terms frequently, but what is prioritized as Toru grows up is any chance at real love.

Again, none of this is subtext, if anything Murakami is awkwardly un-subtle with how he uses Reiko to explain the themes of the story to the reader. I genuinely don't understand where or how people are complaining about how the women were written related to sex when the themes of the novel make it clear that when Toru does sexualize women it was wrong and that true intimacy is more valuable. And even when women talk about sex just for the sake of casual sex I don't see how it's wrong for that to exist in a story.

The last thing I've seen people critique is how the book handles suicide as how it it treats it as a plot device. To that I say that suicide is definitely a plot device, but so what? I don't see the issue. I think the point is to show how close Toru really was to losing his own life. Kizuki, Naoko, and Hatsumi's deaths are kinda treated like they came out of nowhere by the people in their lives. Kizuki literally killed himself without clear reason at the start of the novel, people on the outside would have no idea what was going on with Hatsumi, and Naoko seemingly lost her mind back and forth and killed herself after getting better. But Toru, and the reader, knows that there was more to it. We learn about Kizuki from Naoko, and Naoko we know is haunted by Kizuki and unable to let it go, and Hatsumi is abused and tortured emotionally by Nagasawa. The deaths seem abrupt, but there was a clear path that led all of these people to despair, and Toru was on that path just as they were. I think it's fine to have characters kill themselves for the themes of a novel, people unfortunately kill themselves all the time, and suicides like the ones in NW are far from extraordinary or uncommon. I'm not sure how it seemed cheap to people, for me it felt sadly very real.

All of this brings me to Reiko who is pretty indefensible even for me. Any criticism of Reiko is probably fair and I think that the way her character is written is one of the biggest issues with the book. Her sexual trauma is genuinely upsetting, but also extremely confusing because it just never comes back around. Murakami made the weird choice to have Reiko's assailant be a child, and for Reiko to say multiple times that the girl had many victims, and then it never cam,e back or mattered. The fact that the girl never recurred as a character really begs the question of why did it have to be a kid in the first place, was it really necessary to write a rape scene involving a child when it never mattered again later on in the novel?

I'm on the fence because it's challenging and things like this do happen in real life, but the fact that that circle never closed frustrated me. Especially when the fulfillment of Reiko's arc was having sex with Toru. This was the only sex in the novel that felt wholly unnecessary to me, it can only be explained by both of them being trashed and it feels like it cheapens both of their characters. It definitely struck me as lazy writing and as sex for the sake of sex. Reiko is the biggest sore thumb in the novel for me, as both points of the book that struck me as bad to questionable involved her.

The other main criticism I had of the book does involve women, but specifically their dialogue. I don't mind how sex is written and how the sexual lives of women are portrayed, but the way the dialogue is written is at times was pretty bad. It very much feels like a man's idea of a woman's voice at times, and it was frustrating.

If it isn't clear I loved this book. I thought it was a solid 8.5/10, with consistently beautiful prose and a heartbreaking story. Toru is annoying, but he's just a kid who is doing his best. I could have written 8 more paragraphs just defending Toru as a character. He's so well written- and consistently written too. He grows up and matures in a very believable fashion. As someone who has been a young and disaffected college student I found his story very relatable and that the novel accurately captured what it feels like to be 19 and scared while simultaneously the world and people around you are opening up to you in ways they didn't before. I can see why people hate him as a protagonist, but mostly I just pitied him, and hoped he would eventually make the right choices. I don't think a protagonist needs to be a good person or always do things right. Murakami writes a lot of flawed characters, and I think sometimes people like them too seriously, and take having written the character as an author's approval of the character's actions. I think Murakami very clearly disapproves of Toru's actions for most of the book, but also empathetically understands how a kid makes these mistakes and can learn for the better.

I'm really curious to hear some thoughts on this, because as it says in the title I did find the criticisms to be overblown on the whole, and that some of them sound like it's just people being made uncomfortable by sex rather than the sex being poorly written. I feel like people forget that everyone in this book in 19 years old too lol.