Sleep and the need for breaks from routine - Bradley

 Haruki Murakami’s story Sleep explores the fragile boundary between routine life and personal awakening. The story follows a woman who finds herself unable to fall asleep for seventeen consecutive days. Instead of suffering, she becomes energized and has a new keen awareness of how she feels about her life. Murakami uses this insomnia as a metaphor for consciousness itself. Without the constraints of nightly rest the protagonist begins to reclaim lost parts of her identity that had been dulled by domestic routine; she reads works such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, drinks brandy, eats chocolate, and starts to develop an appreciation of her independence. The stillness of nighttime offers her a private space untouched by the expectations of her roles as wife and mother. Yet, beneath this newfound clarity lies a growing feeling of unease and resentment for her current situation. Murakami subtly shifts the tone from introspective to unsettling, leaving readers questioning whether her sleepless state is a gift or a descent into instability. Ultimately, Sleep is a reflection on identity, autonomy, and the hidden dissatisfaction that can exist within ordinary life. Murakami suggests that awakening, whether literal or metaphorical, can be both exhilarating and dangerous, revealing truths that are difficult to confront.

A Lack of Self-Reflection - Thomas Weber

 Reading the stories assigned for today after having read the interview was a very different experience than I expected. I have to say, I was not particularly impressed with Murakami's self-reflection on his representation of women in literature and found his views to be, in my own terms, a big ol "nothing-burger." What I mean by this is that I did not feel that he truly engaged with Kawakami's critiques, instead retiring to a weak idea of "writing human characters." This de-legitimizes his portrayal of women to me as it ignores a dimension of his writing that is so often to his thought process. Whilst one is free to think however they may, I find it almost slightly disingenuous to say that one writes without taking gender into account and then make constant reference to the "role" of men and women and their complementary nature. I do find it interesting that Murakami described the woman as being scary in the story about the green monster entering her home, finding the comment to be somewhat vindictive towards women. To me, whilst what happened in the story is somewhat gruesome, it was less about being scary and more about a woman's agency. Potentially even linking to ideas of rape and consent. In the end, I believe that Murakami may have been a bit dismissive of Kawakami's comments.

Overall, whilst I like Murakami from a literary perspective and find him to be a great writer, I do tend to prefer authors with a bit more gender and theme sensitivity like Banana Yoshimoto and Kawakami.

Intention vs. Execution in Writing a Female Character -Alexia

In the interview between Kawakami and Murakami, I found their brief discussion on "The Little Green Monster" interesting. Murakami is surprised that women enjoy reading it, when he meant to portray the female narrator as scary and cruel. I agree with Kawakami in that she did not come off as particularly scary, but there was a familiar sense to her character. I think "The Little Green Monster" could almost be interpreted as some type of attempted sexual assault. A green monster enters a woman’s home, unexpected and uninvited, and tries to force a marriage proposal on her. The "marriage proposal” could very well be a euphemism for an unwanted sexual advance. While we know that this is not the case after reading the interview, it could still be an interpretation that unfortunately many women relate to. Additionally, it could also be viewed that the woman was standing up for herself, especially when she seemed to be torturing the monster with her mind. This could be another reason that women find this story enjoyable to read, because it is refreshing to see a woman stand up for herself instead of being submissive to a man’s desires. However, learning that Murakami’s intention was for the woman to be scary is particularly unsettling. Despite his intentions, this suggests that when women advocate for themselves, they are seen as cruel, rather than justified. Subsequently, this makes me wonder what this story would have been like if told from a man’s perspective. Would Murakami still view the narrator as scary, or would his interpretation change? And would he be equally surprised if men found the story enjoyable to read?

Similarities Between Gregor Samsa and “Watashi” in Sleep- Carly

After reading The Metamorphosis and Sleep, I found that I interpreted both stories as being about repression rather than typical depression. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa was the breadwinner of his family because of his father’s failed business and his mother's inability to work. It is undeniable that Gregor lived a dull life, with a grueling job, but he accepted his role and played it well. He even planned for the future, hoping to send his sister to the conservatory so she could pursue the violin. This hope seemed to keep him going. It seems that Gregor’s parents placed him in the role of the caretaker for his family, and he was expected to fulfil it without question. This becomes even clearer when the family becomes disgusted with Gregor once he is no longer able to work and perform this role. Their attitude is finally solidified when the parents discuss Grete’s prospects and think about marrying her off,  revealing the strict expectations the parents envisioned for their children. This theme of repression appears again in Samsa in Love. When Gregor asks the locksmith if they can meet again, he allows himself to experience human emotions. Unlike in The Metamorphosis, where Gregor never got to choose the person he wanted to be, this version of himself shows how having the ability to choose makes him more human. 

In Sleep, Watashi wakes up from the dream with the man pouring water on her feet. I feel like Watashi waking up from this dream prematurely prevented her from seeing whatever she had been repressing. Her body’s only way of forcing her to confront what she didn’t want to see was to stop letting her sleep. Up until this point, Watashi also fulfilled her role well. She was a mother and wife; she maintained the house when her husband and son were away, and she took care of her son when he returned. However, throughout the story, it becomes clear that Watashi has changed in ways she never intended since taking on her role, and she had been ignoring this. Watashi briefly mentions how she stopped seeing her husband as her protector, yet even after admitting that, she still jokes with him and stops eating chocolate simply because he is a dentist. These disconnections with her mind and her actions show how she suppressed herself in order to maintain the image of a “good housewife.” 

In both The Metamorphosis and Sleep, Gregor and Watashi live on autopilot, carrying out their roles as the breadwinner and the housewife. Neither expresses their worries to anyone around them; instead, they are both pushed out of their daily routines by forces they cannot control. Gregor had to transform into a bug so he could stop performing the role he never chose. Watashi had to stop sleeping to regain the parts of herself she let slip away as she sank further into her assigned role.  

intimacy feels distant

Murakami’s portrayal of women often feels convincing at first, but as you keep reading, a certain distance begins to show. In Sleep, for example, the narrator speaks in a calm, controlled tone, describing the dull rhythm of daily life and a quiet sense of awakening. The details are sharp and believable, yet it still feels like the voice is being watched from the outside rather than fully lived from within. This sense of distance also appears in the way he writes relationships and marriage. His couples don’t usually fall apart in dramatic ways. They share the same space and routines, but never fully reach each other. Nothing is openly broken, but something is always missing. In The Ice Man, this becomes more obvious. The relationship feels gentle on the surface, but there is an imbalance that never goes away. The woman accepts a kind of emotional coldness that she cannot really touch or change. In The Little Green Monster, the strangeness is more direct. The encounter with the creature feels absurd at first, but gradually it reads more like something internal, tied to desire or fear that has no clear way of being expressed. 

Across these works, Murakami doesn’t treat marriage as a stable or comforting structure. It feels more like a quiet space where loneliness grows, just in a less visible way.

- Wendy

Murakami: 'I don't see gender' - Juliet

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.

The Body as Artistic Machinery in "Sleep"

Though I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation on sleep that centered around femininity and womanhood, I also found this part towards the end of the story particularly interesting because I've been reading a bit of Marxist criticism in my literary theory class: "Huge semis roll past, shaking the ground as they head east. Those guys don't sleep at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater efficiency. What a waste. I could work day and night. I don't have to sleep" (107). I've been required to think a lot about the body as a source of living labor and the process of alienation which occurs in the worker as they become estranged from the ends of their labor. In the broad sense under capitalism, the worker is meant to reach peak performance by using their time efficiently, so I find this comparison to truck drivers (some of the most isolated laborers there are) so well-crafted because the main character of "Sleep" does not use extra hours of the day to work—she uses them to read. 

This idea first came to me because I wanted to write about the thoughts about death put forth in "Sleep," that death is more like everlasting consciousness than it is to a never-ending sleep which is posited just before the excerpt I quoted above. The way this main character discusses her body like a machine to me paints the constant endurance of physical labor to a kind of death because even though she is able to be fulfilled by reading and swimming and indulging herself, she is only able to do those things if she forgoes her biological imperatives and loses her "ground of being." Not only that, she described the sort of automated bodily responses of a laborer in an assembly line (or in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times). Cooking and shopping and laundry and mothering: What were they if not 'tendencies'? I could do them with my eyes closed. Push the button. Pull the levers. Pretty soon, reality just flows off and away. The same physical movements over and over again. Tendencies. They were consuming me, wearing me down on one side like the heel of a shoe" (99). This explanation of the severed connection between body and mind is exactly the sort of alienation that makes complete dedication of humanity to labor possible. Murakami then expands this by portraying the main character's (anti-capitalist, in a Marxist reading) rebellion against this system. She states, "I'm through with sleep! So what if I go mad? So what if I lose my 'ground of being'? I will not be consumed by my 'tendencies'," (99) thus declaring that she will not be consumed by the false impulse towards efficiency. Her lack of sleep, though it does end up destroying her in the end, allows her to use her body as more than just a mechanism for housework and utilize her mind by invigorating her intellect—the more artistic part of her brain that was shut down by the constant drudgery of motherhood.

Overall, I don't mean to assign one specific reading for this really amazing story, nor would I want to try to determine Murakami's intentions for this story either; however, I do find these ideas of automation and the mechanics of the human body compelling in this story about a woman who resists sleep as a social and physical convention. 

—Alana