: Shame and male sexuality
I recently read a Haruki Murakami novel, namely Norwegian Wood, for the first time in years, and thereby dislodged a painful memory of a family vacation. In middle school, I brought Murakami’s then-new 1Q84 to read on the trip, and at some point when I was out for a swim, my sister and grandmother started leafing through the book. When I returned, they accosted me and demanded to know why I was reading this kind of “pornography.”
It’s true, there was sex in the novel, a good amount of it, described in much detail. But 1Q84 isn’t porn. Murakami’s novels are about many things: boyhood and girlhood, existentialism, the futility of human connection and the need to try anyway.
It’s just that my sister and grandma had happened to open my book to a sex scene first. They humiliated me, first shaming me for reading it at all, then (when I objected that the book was about more than sex) mocking me, saying, “But you know which parts you skipped to.”
When we checked out of the hotel, I left the book on the nightstand.
This experience taught me three things:
- It is wrong for a boy to think too much about sex.
- All boys think too much about sex.
- There is nothing you can do about the previous two facts.
In other words, I was ontologically disgusting.
The women who raised me spoke often about the importance of so-called emotional intelligence, but constantly put me in a “man box” from which I could not reach any of the tools that might have taught me how to understand the emotions of others. Whenever I showed a genuine interest in the complicated emotional facts of life, they told me I was autistic or arrogant or sex-crazed.
I am trying to free myself from the box.
Reading Norwegian Wood again as an adult has given me a vindicating experience. According to the blurb, this is “easily the most erotic” of Murakami’s novels, and yet it’s obviously about much more than sex. I remember, at 13, enjoying this book for the characters, for the faraway illustrations of vintage record stores and cafes, for the inventive contrast between the urban and rural—and yes, a bit for the sex, because that’s also an important part of the tapestry of life! And guess what—my recent reading of the book shows that that’s exactly what the book is about. It’s not a porno with a little bit of plot crammed in around the sides, it’s a lush and challenging novel about trying to make the most of a bunch of imperfect role models.
It wasn’t me, but the authority figures around me who were narrowly fixated on the erotic parts of Murakami’s writing.
Go figure.