What Are Haruki Murakami’s Pronouns?
Kafka on the Shore, Teiresias, and the Oscars.
If you look up the Wikipedia entry for Haruki Murakami’s bestselling 2002 novel, Kafka on the Shore, you will read that the character Oshima is a “gay transgender man.” This would probably intrigue Oshima, who never refers to himself that way, and Murakami, who never uses the word “transgender” (to-ran-su-jen-da, an ugly loan word with no graceful Japanese equivalent) in the novel.
Oshima gives his own account of his situation in one of my all-time favorite Murakami scenes. What he says is not “I’m transgender” but “I’m a woman.” It’s a bombshell revelation. Kafka, the main character, has previously seen Oshima, a kindly mentor figure, as a man. That’s how he dresses and, he later says, how he feels. It’s also how parts of his physiognomy work. But the Japanese could not be clearer: Oshima says boku-wa onna da, “I’m a woman.”
The English translation adds “he said,” but Murakami is able to be more subtle in Japanese. There’s no definitively male pronoun—only the word boku, meaning “I,” which is typically used by young men. You could say it has a masculine “flavor” to it rather than a definitively male meaning. So boku-wa onna da, “I am a woman,” is perfectly grammatical but unmistakably disorienting, a sentence that wears a dress but smells of leather and tobacco. It scrambles the brain, which is the whole point.
It’s clearly the whole point. Oshima brings the subject up in the first place because he is being harangued by two indignant crusaders who have taken it upon themselves to complain about some minor perceived gender inequality in the library where he works. They tell Oshima, “you are a totally pathetic, historical example of the phallocentric.” This amuses him since, as he points out, he has no phallus. Having boggled the narrow minds of the amateur revolutionaries, he explains more gently to Kafka that “I don’t understand it myself. Like, what the heck am I, anyway?”
“Well,” replies Kafka, “I don’t know what I am, either.” It’s almost too on-the-nose: this is what the novel is all about. Murakami noted in a 2023 introduction that the name “Kafka” sounds in Japanese like “可不可,” ka-fuka, meaning something like “possible/not possible.” Yes and no, this and that—it’s a novel about how selfhood refuses to be nailed down, how every available category always leaves a hazy space around the edges (you know, like the foam that divides the beach from the sea on the Shore).
Which is why Oshima doesn’t object so much to militant leftist politics as to any politics that deals in thunderous certainties. It’s the shallowness of what T.S. Eliot called “hollow men” that annoys him: “Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas—none of them bother me. I don’t care what banner they raise. But what I can’t stand are hollow people.” The genius of the scene is that, like the novel as a whole, it’s mercilessly Protean. Every time you think you’ve about got the shape of it, it slips out of your grasp.
These are the themes that obsess Murakami. Like Oshima, or like one of those Magic Eye autostereograms, his novels keep flipping in and out of supposedly opposing modes depending on how you squint or change your focus. Plotlines swerve to elude tidy interpretation right when you think you’ve understood them as allegory or metaphor. His latest, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, toggles between the real world and a mythical spirit realm that is also probably the human mind, and the subconscious—or maybe it’s the real world, and our world is the dream.
It’s all a form of Shinto 神隠し, kamikakushi or “getting hidden among the gods”—the mythical trope made famous by its translation, in the title of Hayao Miyazaki’s most successful film, as Spirited Away. The spirits come and take you to a world where the rules are warped, and they mix up your identity (Chihiro in Spirited Away loses one of the characters in her name, so that 千尋, pronounced “Chihiro,” becomes 千, pronounced “Sen”). Then you have to figure out as best you can how to become whole again.
It’s easy to see why sexual ambiguity would be part of that artistic world. The City and Its Uncertain Walls includes an old man (definitely a man this time) who decides one day to wear a dress. It makes him feel, he says, like a couple of lines from a beautiful poem—the kind of explanation that explains nothing but somehow makes sense in-universe. It’s the same kind of logic that made the Greek prophet Teiresias, “Old man with wrinkled female breasts,” turn into a woman for seven years after striking two snakes with his staff. That’s just his role in the tales: the blind seer, the crosser of boundaries, the man of contradictions.
Why the snakes? Because mystery, that’s why. Because mystery is real, and logic can’t always capture it. Art can.
So to define Oshima with a string of coordinates on the identity chart—“gay transgender man”—is a literary crime of the first water. I’m sorry to harp on this, I just can’t get it out of my head and I think it reveals something about why trans politics has helped make pop culture so very tedious and stupid. It’s a perfect example of the airless, self-serious thinking that Oshima lives to thwart in the first place.
“Trans men are men” is a slogan that seems at first to “challenge” or “transgress” gender norms but actually flattens them hideously in a desperate effort to categorize everything for political expediency. This attitude has fostered not only medical barbarities but also a braindead art of perma-celebration and an unsettling cultural fondness for historical revisionism. Which is why Ellen Page’s birth name has likewise been wiped from Wikipedia, why Emperor Elagabalus of Rome is now trans, and why PBS feels entitled to reach back in time and turn a dead Stonewall drag queen into a “black transgender woman.” Because for category politics to work, everyone, always, must fit into one of the categories we use now.
All this makes for tasteless and sloppy readings of both art and life. It makes for movies like Conclave and Emilia Pérez, two current Oscar contenders in which intersex and trans people are shunted demeaningly about as pat tokens in this and that sanctimonious object lesson. One may hope that the age of this pablum is drawing to a close.
Categories are real. Systems can be good. Also, most categories are less than perfect and all systems are less than complete. There really are people—a small minority of people, but very much people, nonetheless—whose physical condition is complicated as relates to the natural binary of male and female. And all of us have felt at some point or another that no absolutely rigid idea of manhood or womanhood can fully capture the enormity of our personalities. These two obvious and basic facts produce a lot of heartache, a lot of longing, and a lot of ambiguity—even, sometimes, beautiful ambiguity—that can never be resolved. It has been a terrible mistake to try.
I can't find definitively which sentence in this article I disagree with, but somehow the direction of the critique feels inverted.
Our current cultural stupidity feels less like a misguided attempt to categorize the ambiguous, but rather an attempt to make unnecessarily ambiguous what is utterly clear and easily categorizable. Your point is will taken: category boundaries remain stubbornly fuzzy. But even taking the vanishingly rare intersex case into account, male and female as categories are about as certain as it's possible to imagine. Even masculinity and femininity, which are orders of magnitude more malleable than that, are still remarkably and meaningfully distinct.
It's not that it's impossible to be over-rigid in our mental models of these things. But we'd have to march a long way in that direction before I would be worried about our having overcorrected.