After quite some years I started re-reading Murakami. I remember I stopped reading him because it got so repetitive and I really had some problems with the way he portraits women. I found 1Q84 absolutely ridiculous in that regard. I didn't even finish the book, not even the first volume, and stopped reading him altogether at that point (I had read almost every Murakami book anyway).

I read A Wild Sheep Chase past week, and already begun reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and I found that it was way worse than I remembered. Women in his books seem to be not real people or even passable characters but mere caricatures, objects which only reason of being is to fulfill the fantasies of the male protagonist.

I created this post on r/Murakami. On seeing the responses given I just checked out again another Murakami novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (which is usually considered his best work) just to be sure I was not overreacting or something. To my surprise I found things were even worse than I expected at that point.

Below you'll find (part of) what I found on the first pages of the book. But before you read it bear in mind that this is not exceptional and is no particular to this book, as a fact when I picked up this novel, I thought it was the less troublesome in that regard. You can find analog examples in virtually each and every novel of Murakami.

Here we go.

In the first pages of the book the main character is informed that his bother in law raped a woman.

His reaction?

“That’s terrible,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this, but if he did hurt your sister, you have my heartfelt condolences. I must tell you, however, that my brother-in-law and I have virtually nothing to do with each other. So if you are expecting some kind of—”

He really seems to be unconcerned about the woman, Creta Kanoo, who has been “violently raped” but rather his only concern is about he himself not getting into trouble... and about his cat which is a leitmotiv in Murakami's books in case you don't know.

The protagonist ignores the fact that his brother in law had raped a young woman and goes on with his life. He doesn't even think about the possibility of letting his wife know, and is not like he is concerned he will upset her, he simply doesn't give a damn about it, at least no clues are given in the book that can lead us to think that is the case.

Now, what about the sister of the woman who has been violently raped? What is her stand in all this? What are her thoughts?

If there is someone who should be held responsible for what happened, that person is myself. For being inattentive. For not having protected her as I should have.

Yes, you read correctly, the rapist is not to be blamed, the responsible here is she herself for not being “protective” enough with her little sister!

Later on in the book, Creta Kanoo, the victim, visits the protagonist in his apartment and for no reason whatsoever starts explaining her whole life to him. It happened that when she was younger she had suicidal tendencies and in the other hand she had a lot of money debts... Guess what she did at that point?

She prostituted herself.

Her corollary:

compared with death, it would be nothing at all for me to sell my body

But something happen in her new life:

One night, when I was propositioning men by the station, two men grabbed me from behind. At first I thought it was the police, but then I realized that they were gangsters. They dragged me into a back street, showed me some kind of knife, and took me to their local headquarters. They shoved me into a back room, stripped my clothes off, strung me up by the wrists, and proceeded to rape me over and over in front of a video camera. I kept my eyes closed the entire time and tried not to think. Which was not difficult for me, because I felt neither pain nor pleasure.

Believe it or not it seems this ordeal was no big deal for her (after all she felt neither pain nor pleasure). As a fact the gangsters who raped her and forced her to work for them (for a 60% rate) were not even bad people because:

After that, I didn’t have to stand on street corners anymore. All I had to do was show up at their office in the evening, and they would tell me which hotel to go to. They sent me good customers, as they had promised. I’m not sure why, but I received special treatment. Maybe it was because I looked so innocent. I had an air of breeding about me that the other girls lacked. There were probably a lot of customers who wanted this not-so-professional type. The other girls had three or more customers a day, but I could get away with seeing only one or, at most, two. The other girls carried beepers with them and had to hurry to some run-down hotel when the office called them to sleep with men of uncertain background. In my case, though, I always had a proper appointment in a proper first-class hotel—or sometimes even a condo. My customers were usually older men, rarely young ones

And now the nonsense comes to its climax:

Creta Kano took a deep breath and held it. Then she picked up her coffee cup, stared into it for a while, gave her head a little shake, and put the cup back on the saucer. “It was around that time that I met Noboru Wataya.”

“Noboru Wataya?! As a customer?!”

Creta Kano nodded in silence.

“But—” I began, then stopped to consider my words for a time. “I’m having a little trouble with this. Your sister told me the other day that Noboru Wataya raped you. Was that something separate from what you’re telling me now?”

So if you are a prostitute there's no way a client (anyone?) can rape you, or so our protagonist's bewilderment implies.

Ugly things really don't stop here. The next thing we read is that the morning after this conversation took place the protagonist dreams that Creta Kanoo, the woman who has been repeatedly raped and abused, gives him a head...

I can't really see how the extreme sexism expressed here can be excused with “is a cultural thing” line of reasoning. Actually that would be a kind of insult to Japanese culture imo.

I don't quite get how no one seems to be concerned about this and there's no debate about it or so it seems. Is not like his books have issues here and there: is all over the place and is not hidden or veiled somehow... Is at full sight. Yet there seems to be little concern about it, which is strange considering he is a mainstream writer who sells millions of books every year.

Thoughts?

Edit: typo