I enjoyed reading the Murakami interview…if I were the interviewer, I would definitely push back against one thing he said: In every other respect, I wrote the character to be a human being, without really being conscious of her as a woman.” I doubt the possibility of this—not that I think Murakami is being dishonest, but that the statement shows a lack of awareness of how fundamental gender is to his and everyone’s perception of the world. One of my professors said something the other day about how deep gender runs, and I think it was so smart: Gender is the first thing you notice about someone and the last thing you forget. If you don’t remember someone’s gender, you don’t remember anything about them. How can Murakami claim that he is not conscious of his characters being women, especially since he imagines the particulars of their clothing and body as he creates his characters?
The interview also gave me more of a feel for Murakami’s personality. He seems like a very passive person. But there also feels to be some stubbornness, maybe willful ignorance coming through. He didn’t seem to take Kawakami’s criticisms seriously, expressing the idea that understanding his characters from the lens of any “ism” [seems a bit reductive when we’re talking about feminism in particular] is unimportant for him. The more I reflect on the interview, the more I actually feel like I don’t like him—especially after reading all the hate comments. I think there’s something to this one: “EVERY writer writes human beings and the world how they see it. That's not a defense for poor characterization of a specific group of people.” I’ll just leave it there.
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