Kiitschy’s Reviews > 1Q84 > Status Update

To add on aomeme: i like that shes named after beans.. i like that shes kinda offbeat. She appreciates bald heads and asks weird questions. She is very controlling of her appearance bc its one of her biggest strengths. So i like that murakami gave her misshapen ears, that she hides behind her hair. I like that character note, i really liked what she had going in the first chapter. She’s starting to lose me, though.

Aomame’s chapters have a weird eroticism to them that completely throw off the story. Theres always a nipple hardening somewhere. I really dont care. Sometimes I feel like im reading Murakami’s unedited drafts, where he got offtrack bc of his raging hard-on for this character. That’s a very weird thing to do for a character who spends her days murdering domestic abusers. Yea she can be sexy, but i really dont want to hear abt how small her boobs are every single chapter. Tengo doesnt have this. And i know its reductive to say “imagine if we wrote male characters this way” bc women *are* socialised to be sexual objects and simultaneously being proper and innocent. Of course itd be weird to flip that script and put it on a man. But sometimes I wish women in fiction were treated with the same dignity as men are. Tengo’s sexual exploits are a backdrop, where it seems to consume all of Aomeme’s chapters. this isnt even a hard rule, u could probably do most things in this in a respectable manner, im not a closed book. I just know i dont like how murakami does it. Which is weird because ive seen him write women more respectably. It feels like it was all thrown out the window for aomeme. But wat do i know…im only 13% through, he can still right this wrong!!