Right from the start, the constant revocation of the memory of the young girl by her ‘lithe young body’, ‘big breasts…swing back and forth when you ran’ can remind readers of the problem with Murakami and the sheer objectification of his female characters.
Add to that, his female characters serve as mere plot devices for the men to really gain centre stage. The lover of the narrator is absent from the second part of the novel. We never see her beyond the narrator’s need for sexual gratification or his need for self-affirmation.
The same goes with the owner of a coffee shop he meets, whom he imagines to be in his bed. She is gone once she’s served a purpose for the narrator.
The absence of a woman’s authentic existence in Murakami’s world makes the novel phallocentric and one that works on the dictates of male ego, fantasies, and grief. While this grief in itself is not an issue, the manner in which it is played out at the cost of the women’s grief and alienation makes the reader pine for a more wholesome narrative.
Finishing the book was exhausting. The novel is too big, with too many repetitions that add little to the plot. More than proving a convincing story, it makes the reader want to skim rather than engage in understanding his loneliness, stagnation, and aloofness, of which we had been aware for 200 or so pages already.
Murakami alludes to various writers like Marquez and Proust. But the question remains: is the novel posturing itself to convince its readers of its greatness? The answer is no.
The novel falls flat by constant blurring of boundaries, which Marquez considers nonexistent in his works. Similarly, the Proustian self-indulgence goes haywire here because, unlike the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, we don’t see Murakami’s narrator come to the reader in full force.
With Murakami, an intelligent reader eventually reaches a point when they are able to see through his plots, his predictable characters, and the necessity to imagine a depth to change one. When the ghost tells the narrator, ‘What I can say is one more thing—never give up believing.
If you can believe strongly, deeply, in something, the road ahead will become clear’, one wonders if this is what Murakami asks his reader of him and his books. If not for the belief in the greatness of his depth, would his novel work anymore?
‘The absence of a woman’s authentic existence in Murakami’s world makes the novel phallocentric and one that works on the dictates of male ego, fantasies and grief. Also, the novel is too big, with too many repetitions that add little to the plot.’
