While stretched out in the quaint Christchurch Alice Cinema at the afternoon viewing of Drive My Car, I consider Haruki Murakami. The film playing is based on one of his short stories of the same name and flipped into an extended narrative on each end. I think about Murakami’s novels, the ones I’ve read, the marvelous storytelling, but also what I find difficult in them.
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer, known for his speculative and philosophical fiction. He has a talent for mixing entertainment with social and political awareness. In his acceptance speech at the Jerusalem Prize 2009, he explains that his novels aim to “bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it”. His works have polarized literary critics and readers alike. Despite this, he has had great success selling millions of copies of his novels not just in Japan but internationally.
Drive my Car
Drive my car, is a short story that is featured in one of Murakami’s best-selling short story collections, Men Without Women, published in 2017. Men without women is a collection where Murakami uses his innate powers of observation to describe stories of men who find themselves alone.
In Drive my car, veteran actor, and widower Yusuke Kafuku needs a driver and ends up hiring a young woman in her 20s. The story follows Kafuku as he tries to come to terms with his wife’s four affairs and Misaki Watari a young woman driver in her 20s. The friendship between Kafuku and Misaki grows when the two start telling personal details of their lives and they find a calm comfort in each other’s company.
The beginning of the story starts on a gendered note with the main character Kafuku considering the driving skills of women. Murakami writes, “Kafuku had reached the conclusion that most female drivers fell into one of two categories: either they were a little too aggressive or a little too timid”. This is an unsurprising inclusion in the story, as the current narrative about women’s driving skills, is that they are plain bad at it. Who hasn’t experienced the wrath of a male driver cursing a Suzuki swift driver’s road faux pas, muttering phrases where the assumed gender is “she” only for them to drive past and realize it wasn’t who they expected? Or is that just me?
For Kafuku, it only takes one short ride with young, Misaki, to see that she is a competent driver and that she does not fall into the category of timid or aggressive. Later in the story, he even describes her as an excellent driver.
What is subtle but important about Drive My Car is its shift from the initial chauvinistic beginning to an unexpected friendship between Kafuku and Misaki. Their relationship is, refreshingly, completely platonic. Misaki reveals personal information to Kafuku about her life. When talking about her mother she was very open and honest with Kafuku. “My mother’s dead. She was driving drunk, lost control of the steering wheel, went into a spin, and flew off the road and into a tree. She died almost instantly. I was seventeen”. Kafuku responds to her openness by revealing details about his life, he confided in Misaki that his wife was having affairs, in After Dark it reads, “Kafuku hesitated for a moment before plunging in. “To tell you the truth, he was one of my wife’s lovers. He didn’t know that I knew, though.”. Both of the characters felt comfortable enough after spending time with each other for a while to confide the secrets of their lives to each other. A small friendship is created out of it, which is special for these characters as they both discuss how they do not have friendships in their lives.
When considering how gender is portrayed in the novel, it is commendable that Misaki’s personal life and back story are explained even though it feels like she is mainly used in the story as a soundboard for Kafuku to reveal his feelings about his wife’s affairs. It’s great that her excellent driving skills and cool demeanour, subvert typically stereotypical expectations of women, how she looks is still an important part of her character. Kafuku comments “I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while,” he said. “But there’s something very attractive about you. You’re not homely at all, you know.” This part of the story is particularly strange as he is quite a bit older than Misaki and there is no reason for him to comment on her appearance. The beauty of women tends to be something Murakami likes to focus on in his novels. In both Norwegian Wood’s Naoko and After Dark’s Eri, their physical appearances are talked about at length and are important to the male characters.
We see Murakami flex his philosophical take on the human experience through a quote from Kafuku when he is talking about how acting allows him to become someone else and then return to himself. “The self that one returned to was never exactly the same as the self that one had left behind.” This is a clear example of how Murakami tends to intertwine philosophical concepts into his stories, which asks the reader to think deeply about what they are reading and how it relates to their life.
The film Drive my car was directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and released in August 2021. Hamaguchi fleshes out the short story for the screen by including events that happened before and after the events that the short story talk of. In the film, we learn more about Misaki and her hauntingly troubled past and there are multiple new characters introduced as actors rehearsing for the Chekhov play, Uncle Vanya. Drive my Car, the film, won many awards including The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Japan Academy Award for Newcomer of the Year. Murakami super fans need to run to the cinema to see this one. Hamaguchi did well to encapsulate the eerie observation skills of Murakami and how important the simple moments are, the moments where things are left unsaid. Haruki Murakami himself said that he enjoyed watching the adaptation but admitted that he didn’t remember much about writing his short story. Go figure.
Norwegian Wood
Murakami’s novel that pushed him into the semi-mainstream and subsequently into my kindle catalogue is Norwegian Wood translated into English by Jay Rubin and published in 1987. It’s said to be the most realistic of his novels and marketed as a coming-of-age love story, even though I would challenge whether any of the complicated relationships in the story provide any typical idea of Love. Norwegian Wood is a captivating novel that deals with the complexities of the human experience. The tale follows Toru Watanabe, who opens the story by listening to Norwegian Wood by the Beatles (thus the title) and from this is thrown back into memories of his youth in the 1960s. The reader follows Toru as he attends Waseda University in Tokyo and as he becomes devoted to his high school friend Naoko, their passion overshadowed by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Murakami describes how Toru feels the grips of death everywhere and how the beautiful but troubled Naoko finds life unbearable and goes to a sanatorium to get better. The novel is a vivid snapshot of Tokyo in the 60s during the student revolution and a compelling glimpse into a boy’s first painful love.
What is striking about this novel is Murakami’s strong talent to expand ordinary moments into meaningful messages packed with complexities. He does this through his excellent prose skills. In Norwegian Wood and his following novels he writes with poetic, philosophical language, such as;
“Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. … Death exists – in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table – and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.”
The subtle hope Murakami portrays at the end of the book isn’t some clichéd message about how time heals all but instead is about how, slowly, we can move our lives into a different pathway, to begin a journey less painful.
I would be mistaken to omit a commentary about how Murakami portrays the female character, Naoko, in Norwegian wood. Naoko is written as a delicately, beautiful, simple girl, who finds the world too difficult. Murakami doesn’t write her with any defining characteristics, and she is used mainly as a character to define Toru and his life. Her character disappointed me as it fell into the common young adult trope of women being beautiful but damaged. The problem with this trope, also used in John Greens Looking for Alaska, is that they are negative, stereotypical descriptions of weak-willed women that teach us that men will always be the dominant protagonist of every story, thus only ever leaving supporting roles for women to fill. Naoko in Norwegian wood functions only as a
transitional stage through which the male protagonist, Toru, must decide whether to choose her, the past or the other female character Midori who represents the future. Considering Norwegian Wood’s publication date, 1987, it isn’t surprising that this is included, but doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t still be addressed when recommending the book forward.
Apart from the aforementioned, while dealing with adolescent characters, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood separates from the typical popular young adult novel. Murakami portrays a unique take on the coming of age because he includes extremely uncomfortable themes such as death, philosophical undertones and bizarre situations that allow the characters to access their subconscious. Murakami also fascinatingly, destigmatizes university and youth culture. We read of Toru picking writing a letter to Naoko over going out drinking and are shown through Toru and the character Midori, whose father is terminally ill, that young people face adversities also.
After Dark
After Dark is a wonderfully vivid novella written by Murakami in 2004. The entire novella takes place over one night and into the early hours of Tokyo. It’s set in a sketchy entertainment district and follows characters that are all connected to an attack on a Chinese prostitute. The novella begins by following Mari Asai, a 19-year-old girl reading an unnamed book in a Denny’s. It is here that she meets Tetsuya. The story also follows Eri Asai as she is in a state of deep sleep and encountering strange occurrences. Murakami transports the reader to the setting with intricate descriptions of both Mari and Denny’s, this is continued throughout the text. The setting of Tokyo is revealed magically with songs to match every new location so that you as a reader can play the song during that chapter and be right there with the characters.
After Dark has Murakami’s usual aspects of speculative fiction without strange abstractions that he includes in his more bizarre novels Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The magic of After Dark is the omnipresent narrator that can zoom out to the greater Tokyo and zoom right back into what is happening with the characters.
Murakami’s portrayal of women in After Dark is complex, I want to focus on Mari’s sister Eri and how Murakami portrays Guo Dongli the Chinese prostitute and the attack on her. Mari explains to Tetsuya that her sister, who he remembers as extremely beautiful, is in a perpetual state of sleep. There is such a particular fixation on Eri’s beauty in the novel and there is nothing more reductive of the agency of a female that watching her sleep and anticipating her waking, also seen in twilight when Edward creepily watches Bella sleep. While there is an interesting narrative about the bond between the sisters, Mari and Eri, it is somehow overshadowed by the constant referral to the fact Eri is more beautiful than Mari.
Unfortunately the way Murakami chooses to portray the Chinese prostitute in the novel, Guo Dongli, is an example of the objectification of women, and sex. The way that she is described by the love hotel manager is, quite like how you would describe an object; “A Chinese gang. They run prostitution around here. They sneak women in by boat from the mainland and make them pay for it with their bodies. They take phone orders, and deliver the women to hotels on motorcycles—hot ‘n’ fresh, like pizza.” . Guo Dougli never has a moment of power in the novel and her story ends with her getting picked up by her pimp to go back into her life as a prostitute. There is no character development for Guo and she is simply used as a way to represent the existence of prostitution phenomena in Japan.
The magic of Murakami is that the way he writes stories makes you look at life in a different, kaleidoscope lens, his plain prose is laced with complex philosophies that subtly asks questions about what it means to be human, what is important to our existence and upon finishing his books I am totally baffled, yet transfixed.
After Dark all in all is a mesmerising novella with endlessly fascinating characters. It is a concise snapshot of Murakami’s work and his writing style. It has controlled aspects of speculative fiction without going off the rails and also has unexpected outcomes that are still satisfying. Setting most scenes with a song was marvellous and added greatly to the reading experience.
Commonalities
The commonalties between Drive my car, Norwegian Wood and After Dark are that they all mix entertainment with social and political awareness and all the main characters experience a life crisis and feel alienated from society. Also in all the texts, unfortunately Murakami uses women as a tool to emboss the male protagonist’s individuality or uses the male gaze. In Drive my car, Misaki is used as a soundboard for Kafuku, In Norwegian Wood Naoko falls into the manic pixie dream girl stereotype and is used solely as a representation of Toru’s past, In After Dark, agency is stripped from both Eri and Guo.
Murakami’s works so often feature similar plot devices or interesting aspects that the fans have created a Murakami Bingo where you can easily see the repetitive use of things such as cats, urban ennui, and precocious teenager. See the wonderful bingo below.
In conclusion, while I am a big fan of Murakami’s writing and the likes of his books overflow my bookshelf, I wanted to challenge myself by looking into how he portrays women as I was aware that this is problematic in his writing. I proceed now better equipped to read his works with a careful eye, to not succumb to the ideas about women he is putting forth.
Dear reader, I have either completely scared you off even glancing at a Murakami book or have created another superfan. Proceed with caution.