filed in Myths and stereotypes
What Do Single Women Look Like?
I have a bone to pick with one of my favorite writers, Haruki Murakami. I love his books, and breathlessly await each publication. I’ve been tearing through his blockbuster novel, IQ84, which arrived in the States a few weeks ago to rave reviews. And then I saw this, on page 179:
“The teacher was a single woman in her mid-thirties. She was far from beautiful and she wore thick, ugly glasses…. A small woman, she was normally quiet and mild-mannered but she could be surprisingly quick-tempered; once she let her anger out, she became a different person, and no one could stop her.”
Murakami is such an inventive writer, and it slays me to see him engage in one lazy stereotype after another. Can you count them?
Photo by Patrick DeMarchelier
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So disappointing! Thanks for pointing it out.
I’m a mid thirty woman and i’m not so ugly as he describes :-)))…he writes about a stereotype and that stereotype it’s so sad. if people think that a mid-thirties woman is like that is really really sad and disappointing.
I’m starting to wonder if Murakami interacts with regular people much anymore. A lot of the characters in this book are not fleshed out. It’s like he’s using shorthand, and I find it really unsatisfying.
While I catch your drift re: writing in stereotypes, you don’t necessarily have to go there. This is one character, and maybe that’s just what the character is like — incidental resemblances to monumental archetypes notwithstanding.
The more I read the book, the more I realized that most of the characters in Murakami’s opus are stereotypical, or maybe more aptly, archetypal. They don’t seem like real flesh and blood, but just representational. I don’t find that compelling. And I wonder if Murakami gets out and interacts with everyday folks.
So you’re saying these characters are more like stock characters, basically.
I’m not sure what to call them, but somewhere along the 900 pages, the characters stopped being interesting.
I’m now in my early 40s. I had men see my photos at family and friends homes and ask to be set up on dates with me.
When I did some modeling for art courses, the instructor took the photos of me and pinned them to a wall in the art classroom.
I later found out from a friend that guys from another art class she was in later in the day would gather round my photos tacked to the wall and ask who I was, because they felt I was pretty, and some wanted to meet me.
I’ve been told I look kind of like a dark haired Marilyn Monroe.
It’s a myth that only ‘ugly’ women stay unmarried.
This made me not to even want to waste my time reading further…..there are better uses of my reading time! Although he at least didn’t make her FAT!(I can say this since I am!)That’s the usual stereotype.
It didn’t seem like a stereotype to me. She is just one woman. What about Miss Saeki, the beautiful, elegant and mysterious, never-married 50-something woman in Murakami’s earlier novel, Kafka on the Shore?
I’ll have to go back to Kakfa on the Shore. Thanks for the lead. I found many of the characters (both women and men) in IQ84 maddening, and thinly drawn.