Humid Summer Malaise
Waxahatchee, Murakami & me
Stay hydrated out there, friends.
Mr. Murakami, I have some questions
I started IQ84 when my state’s lockdown started and naively thought the doorstop text would get me through the end of quarantine. I’m now on my third Haruki Murakami book, and I no longer believe in Santa Claus.
I am in love with Murakami’s prose, really and truly. Something many readers have said about his stories, something that I agree with, is that they’re “dreamlike.” He writes in a meandering way, going from one strange scene to the next without an obviously logical through-line, but his immersive scenes make this feel natural, rather than convoluted or frustrating. His characters often speak in monologues or say exactly what they’re thinking at all times, and one never forgets that they are characters of an Alice in Wonderland magnitude, but somehow that doesn’t take away from the story. There’s a reason I continue to steadily work my way through his oeuvre; his work can act as total escapism and distraction.
Over and over again, though, I find myself frustrated with the way Murakami writes as or about women. Characters’ — at least two of whom, so far in my reading, are underage — breasts are major fixations of either the character herself of the narrator. It’s stated plainly and almost in passing, but it comes up again and again, and doesn’t add to the story. He does write about men’s bodies in understated, repetitive ways at times, as well, but it doesn’t strike the same sexualizing chord.
And women in the stories often pop up just at the right time to help or impart wisdom, as if they’re always waiting in the wings to help a male protagonist reach his goals. Even in 1Q84, which has a female protagonist, a major plot line involves that protagonist waiting for a man. The female characters often feel to me like a robotic, utilitarian dream girl, ready to help a man escape his loneliness. These supporting female roles disappear as quickly as they appear, mission accomplished. Irritating on its own, but why do I need to be reminded about the shape of her breasts every time she’s in a scene?
In an interview with Murakami, the Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami summarizes this in a way that had me nodding my head:
“female characters who exist solely to fulfill a sexual function. On the one hand, your work is boundlessly imaginative when it comes to plots, to wells, and to men, but the same can’t be said for their relationships with women. It’s not possible for these women to exist on their own.”
His vague and frustrating answer is that his characters just “aren’t that complicated” and that patterns and repeated motifs in his work are coincidental. I can’t help but think that means he just doesn’t have or want to create work with a complicated perception of women.
It’s tiring, and especially disappointing because there’s so much else to love in his work. He writes about loneliness and sadness so beautifully. Kawakami is also an admirer of his work, and she contends that some of his short stories, specifically Sleep, have richer female characters than his novels:
What it depicts is not a stock female loneliness or hopelessness, the kind women are used to identifying with, through sympathy and familiarity, because they can see themselves. This human loneliness, relayed to us through a strange tension that won’t let up for a second, moots the fact that the narrator is a woman.
It’s impossible to have an uncomplicated relationship with any media, but most especially the media I admire. Part of me feels guilt for enjoying the writing, for being able to gloss over the glaring issues. I’ve been in a process of deciding when to cut myself slack and when to draw a hard line on these types of inner conflicts for maybe a decade now, and I suppose that will be a life long practice.
I plan to read Sleep and other Murakami short stories next, and I look forward to having at least one character I can reference as a women with dimensions. But I can’t stop wondering how someone with an incredible imagination and gift for communication can continue to create cardboard characters.
Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee
Something about Waxahatchee’s new album reminds me of summers in high school, hanging out with my best friend in her room, both of us full of fidgety energy and free of serious commitments. It’s beautiful and restless music, songs about hurt and resiliency, the process of grappling with change. It makes me furious, really, because I can imagine holding up a lighter at a Waxahatchee show or bumping this album while taking a meandering drive with a friend— which, I can’t do at the moment, the world being the way it is.
The album has country/folk melodies, beachy guitar reverb and swaying beats. Katie Crutchfield’s pleasantly lilting vocals and the way she bends genres, as well as her cathartic lyrics, remind me favorably of recent releases from Sharon Van Etten and Big Thief.
On the song “The Eye,” Crutchfield sings “I have a gift, I've been told, for seeing what’s there” and that’s perhaps the best way I can describe her lyrics. The vivid imagery in her songs coupled with diaristic but sharp insights form an image of a songwriter who is incredibly self-aware, for better and worse. She comes to terms with codependency [“And we both dig a grave/ To immortalize all the shortest waves/ We can try to let stillness be/ But if I spin off, will you rescue me?/ Or will I beg you to set me free?”] and self destruction [“I'll keep lying to myself/ I'm not that untrue/ I'm in a war with myself/ It's got nothing to do with you”] with poetry but without sentimentalizing pain. And she sings about hope, about how things can improve. While I will continue to be sad that I can’t enjoy this music in physical proximity to loved ones, the messages about healing and feeling do resonate with me at this unusual, historical moment.
Thanks for reading! See you later.