i borrowed this book from a friend who was nice enough to let me write annotations and underline passages on her copy. this, apparently, turns out to be a shortcut to my heart. i've heard of how murakami writes about women, i've read it myself in kafka on the shore, but that had less emphasis on women than norwegian wood did, and you know murakami's about to be weird about women when a review displayed on the cover used the word "erotic."
murakami being weird about women is right, by the way, it's such a "men writing women" thing, the way he would just desccribe women's breasts unprompted. this book is also heavy on the madonna-whore complex, but interestingly, naoko, who served as the madonna, had more sexual encounters with watanabe, the main character, than reiko, the supposed "whore", who only had one sexual encounter with watanabe. this is really interesting, i don't know if murakami is commenting on something with that or not. it's also so funny to me how it seems every single significant female character ends up sleeping with watanabe like he's some god. do men really think that way? is it a fantasy of theirs to be seen as sexually attractive by every single woman they meet? that's so odd, and now that i'm thinking about it, naoko and reiko are a lot like some dated female archetypes in japanese media. i remember watching as the gods will way way back then and thinking about how their female characters suck. one of the girls there were literally this suicidal girl the main character helped once and had since then been in love with him. she seems awfully similar to naoko in hindsight, this archetype of a frail woman who needs the male main character's support or else she succumbs to her fragility.
murakami also talks a lot about sex in his books, which i honestly don't have a problem with. sexuality does seem to have a huge impact on our psychology, another thing murakami seems to like touching on. sex in murakami's books are less about sex and more about connection, meaningless and meaningful. watanabe has a lot of sex with nameless women, sex not even portrayed and only said in passing, but the sex there narratively is not just about watanabe having sex, i think these are just about watanabe having meaningless connection with people: meeting once, sleeping together, never seeing each other again. over and over again, loneliness stings so we settle for these fleeting encounters, whether that be sex or not. it is only portrayed as sex here to show an epitome, a heightened vulnerability, because at the end of the day, sex leaves both parties in a vulnerable position.