A review by mexigingerale
Norwegian woods by Haruki Murakami

dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

I went in expecting to love this book, even with the knowledge that Murakami is known for not being able to write women well at all and the books were going to be slightly misogynistic. And until the halfway point I could still see myself giving the book around 4 stars, because while the women were written badly, it was beautiful prose and interesting to read. Then there's an extremely gross, awful scene, that's just brushed of as nothing???? I'm going to write exactly what it is, but in case someone doesn't want to be spoiled, I put a spoiler warning. Though I would recommend spoiling yourself and then skipping those few pages if you really want to read the book still
a woman in her 30s tells the story of her being 'sexually assaulted' by a 13 year old girl and how much she really enjoyed it, also telling the sexual acts in detail
and then later in the book the main character ends up
having sex with that character?
which made no sense to me and ruined one of the few nice sections in the book after the halfway point.  After the halfway point the women in the book got worse and worse in the way they were written and the way the main character talked about his supposed loved Naoko was so gross to me. He mainly thinks about her body, blowjob and how she made him come after
she starts getting worse and then her suicide


I don't think any beautiful prose could make up for this. I do not understand the hype this book gets, when the women are written so awfully and with such problematic elements. And I have enjoyed works before that did have sexism and other problematic works in them, just really not this one. 
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