Women in the World of Murakami Haruki

Public guest lecture by Dr. Gitte Marianne Hansen, Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University.

Murakami Haruki’s most well-known character-type is without doubt the lonesome protagonist—the male narrator who tells his stories through the male pronoun ‘boku’ (‘I’). The few available literary analyses of gender representations in Murakami’s work have generally led to two critical conclusions about his character construction. First, that his fiction mirrors Japanese patriarchy and second, that he positions female characters traditionally as objects for male subjectivities and sexualities.

While some of Murakami’s stories do fit such generalizations, these criticisms appear incomplete. Murakami’s works are not just ‘boku-stories’ (male-narrated-I-stories) that reproduce established gender roles and exploit the female through the male narrative. His works also portray female main characters, protagonists and narrators that act as subjects in their own worlds, using their own language and first person pronoun (‘watashi’) to convey stories of their own, as evident in ‘Sleep’ (1989), ‘The ice man’ (1991) and ‘The little green monster’ (1991). Murakami’s female characters are therefore not limited to stories about the ‘mysterious young girl’ and ‘disappeared woman’ as told by his well-known male boku-narrators. Readers also encounter female characters that are housewife-narrators and strong-willed protagonists, a character development that mirrors women’s shifting position and paradoxical empowerment in contemporary Japanese society and feminist thought.

In this lecture, we will take a closer look at this group of Murakami works and discover how it addresses a diverse array of political, social and personal problems that women in contemporary Japanese society face.

Bio
Gitte Marianne Hansen has a BA in Japanese Studies and a MA in East Asia Studies from the University of Copenhagen. After studying and working in Japan for five years as a teaching and research assistant to Professor Kato Norihiro at Waseda University, she returned to Europe to undertake her PhD research at the University of Cambridge. In 2013 Gitte joined the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University as a lecturer in Japanese studies. 

She is the author of Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan: Navigating contradiction in narrative and visual culture, Routledge 2016. (https://www.routledge.com/Femininity-Self-harm-and-Eating-Disorders-in-Japan-Navigating-contradiction/Hansen/p/book/9781138905306)

The guest lecture is part of JapanSessions, a lecture series funded by the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation.