The distinction is important: I don’t believe Murakami is motivated by a hatred of women. To me, he sounds more like a middle-aged man blinded by his own awooga goggles, who finds perverse delight in writing weird women. And so, in light of this relative nonadmission, he has been labeled a misogynist. Murakami has conceded to finding not much wrong with his depictions. Indeed, we expect one of the world’s most popular writers to realize it is in poor taste to portray women this way.

The novelist Mieko Kawakami, in direct conversation with Murakami, remarked upon his tendency to depict female protagonists as “oracles gateways, or opportunities for transformation.” His women are always defined in relation to men, their raison d’être almost always sexual. In 1Q84, Aomame is a deflated wisp of a character with a confusingly hypersexual inner monologue. He may be a compelling novelist, but his exigent flaw is no longer excused: he is bad at writing female characters-bad, at least, according to contemporary feminist standards. In recent years, perhaps due to the self-conscious turn towards morality in popular fiction, acclaim for Murakami’s work has tempered. And the success of these quasi-surrealist works has, over the past few decades, heightened Western appetites for a magical-realist strain of Japanese fiction-fiction that, despite certain strange or uncanny elements, is approachably Western in sensibility, featuring coherent themes, logical narratives, and direct dialogue.

More than a million copies of Norwegian Wood (1989) and the tome-like 1Q84 (2011) have been sold in the United States to date. Of his 14 novels published in English, most, if not all, have become bestsellers, their familiar covers on prominent display in bookstores nationwide. THE MOST famous Japanese writer for readers in the West is, without a doubt, Haruki Murakami.

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