So far the book’s been perfectly calibrated to keep me reading on pace (or at least while pretending to be on pace) with the club but not actually posting anything, since I’ve found it breezy and pretty consistently fun to read, but the plot and my vague mixed impressions of Murakami by reputation make me want to not say anything while withholding judgment until I have a chance to formulate what I thought about the whole thing. (which seems impossible 'til the very end with this one)
In terms of potential things to be wary about, I was mildly negative about the sexual dynamics, but, honestly, somewhat positive about the Johnnie Walker business. Chapter 19 though I think was a lot more the kind of thing I was worried might turn up… I think as a general rule I don’t like “some characters show up for a needlessly confrontational scene where the author re-enacts an argument he wanted to have, with the character making the point he wanted to make clearly positioned as ‘winning’ in terms of the fiction” scenes, especially when I don’t trust the author enough to think that I’d be on board with their train of thought…
For me I think neither the two women nor Oshima ring true at all - like to pick one example if I picture a trans librarian involved with a library where the books were sorted based on the author’s gender, that seems like it would be very high on the priority list to fix, rather than “when we get around to it”, and if I picture women conducting a survey about access to public spaces for women, I can’t imagine a scenario where “put the women authors first” would actually be their solution. I think in a way the not-realistic feeling of the argument to me makes it easier to extend Murakami the benefit of the doubt that these are like, TERF-y definitely bad feminists and that’s the point… but it comes across more to me like the chapter is against bureaucrats and administration, and uses feminists/accessibility programs as an example. I can’t really envision a situation where any outsider coming into the library to suggest change, even if it were for an extremely valid reason, would be met positively – and I mean, the jumbo jet analogy doesn’t hold since surely jets aren’t public spaces in the same way; you usually have to buy tickets for those… It seems reasonable to me in principle to have oversight over whether spaces open for the public really are available to everyone. The thing the women are coming to the library to do seems in principle fine in my book, even if the specifics are a bad. Whereas my impression is that for the book / Murakami the thing the women are coming to do is bad in principle and the specifics are bad with the latter used to demonstrate the former.
It seemed like Oshima’s gender identity was offered as a partial reason for the hostility and quickness to assume the interlopers were just that and lacked imagination and were coming in bad faith, but that didn’t jibe for me since the hostility read as ultimately directed at their project and point of view in general, rather than their specific poor solutions and gender binary assumptions. And as @sycamore pointed out the dialogue given to Ushima doesn’t work at all…
I would honestly personally probably even go so far as to say that to me Oshima seems less a trans man character in the sense of being earnestly intended to portray that experience, and more a rhetorical device for Murakami to do whatever he’d like with. The “shares tons of extremely personal information as a trump card in an argument” aspect, and tendency to ruminate openly on what his identity means in abstract philosophical terms and not really practical everyday realities support that for me. It comes across to me like Murakami thought having a character with this identity would be interesting for the points and thoughts he wanted to express and went for it without necessarily making the character coherent enough to feel real, similar a bit to how his sex scenes can read to me like a scenario he wanted to describe, moreso than something the characters would do.
That’s not set in stone of course, since I don’t know yet where it’s all going, and I could be misreading or misremembering things, but that’s my take on it at the moment!