Abandonment by Women in Murakami

I've noticed across our readings that Murakami's narrators frequently find themselves facing abandonment, infidelity, or unexplained disappearance by women important to the narrators. From Tony Takitani, A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, South Bay Strut, and Drive My Car, the elements mentioned above can all be found in the female figures. This is not meant to antagonize Murakami or meant as a moral judgment, but I wonder if he has some psychosexual problems that he unwittingly lets spill out on the page. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the unnamed girlfriend abruptly leaves, leaving the narrator heartbroken. In Tony Takitani, the girlfriend dies, again leaving the narrator bereft. In Norwegian Wood (although I have not read to the end), the girl suddenly vanishes to go to a sanatorium and only contacts the narrator many months after he is ghosted. In South Bay Strut, the woman who posed as the lawyer's assistant betrays the main character in a setup. Finally, in Drive My Car, not only does the wife cheat on her loving husband, but she even manages to die tragically afterwards. 

This thematic throughline interests me because Murakami often portrays women as these enigmatic muses who give meaning and light to the narrator's life and then vanish. The disappearance of these women also plays a large part in the narrator's character development, and in stories like Norwegian Wood or Drive My Car, the story would not even exist without the female characters' disappearance. It's almost as if the vanishing is necessary to Murakami's storytelling in a way, because many of his stories focus on loneliness, and his male narrators often do not have many close friends besides their romantic companions, so it is only through the loss of these women that the main character's emotional grief or loneliness can reach a heightened state. Reading these stories of abandonment leaves me feeling cynical and disillusioned... as if Murakami is trying to show that there is no such thing as everlasting love, no matter what feelings came before. Death, cheating, and disappearance is portrayed oftentimes as inexplicable, unexplained, and one of the prime mysteries that his stories are so famous for. Consequently, this gives the female love interests a slightly unreal, uncanny, ghostlike aura. These stories can be read as sexist as a result, but I feel that, strangely enough, in many of these instances, the readers are meant to sympathize with the women to some extent. They are portrayed as having some urgent, pressing need to act in various ways, in a way unfathomable to the main character and therefore to the audience, but nonetheless highly important to them in some way. If I knew more about psychoanalysis, I could probably read more into it, but I'll just leave my analysis there for now.

- Katherine