In December, Manhattan will roll out the red carpet for Haruki Murakami. A full evening of words, music, and lavish praise for one of the West’s most celebrated foreign authors. His popularity’s undeniable. His prose grips American readers with near-devotion. But so does something else: a slow, unsettling thread of sexualized adolescence repeatedly running through his work. Murakami’s novels drift toward adult men orbiting younger girls, lingering descriptions of school-aged bodies, and erotic moments that regularly cross the line. These aren’t stray missteps, but the current that runs under everything he writes. Anyone who’s spent time with his work—and I did in my 20s, unaware of what I was taking in—knows exactly where his stories keep going. The question is simple: why is Manhattan celebrating a writer who fixates on territory any decent adult would steer clear of.
In Norwegian Wood, Murakami’s most famous novel, Toru Watanabe is drawn into the orbit of Naoko, a young woman not far removed from adolescence. But the real unease comes with Midori, a college student built almost entirely out of sexual suggestion, her personality barely a footnote. It isn’t prudish to point out how deliberately the book leans into something that feels creepy. The book claims to explore innocence and grief, but what keeps coming through is an older man’s fixation on much younger women. And the younger the girl, the stronger the pull. The unease builds slowly, then hits all at once, and the whole story feels different when it does.
By Kafka on the Shore, any attempt at subtlety has been tossed. Kafka Tamura is 15 and ends up in bed with a woman who might be his mother. He also sleeps with a girl his own age, but the scene’s written with the lingering eye of a much older man—voyeuristic, slow, and far more fixated on the details than any teenager would be. Critics call it “mythic.” Any honest reader would call it disturbing. The talking cats and parallel worlds don’t disguise anything—it’s an adult author sexualizing teenagers and expecting you to play along.
The perverse pattern sharpens in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Creta Kano describes being “violated” by the narrator while she’s locked in a trance—powerless, confused, far too young to be used this way. Yet the book presents the moment as a spiritual breakthrough rather than what it obviously mirrors: a sexual assault. It isn’t treated as a crime, or even a crisis, but more like scenery. The violation is gratuitous, included less to deepen the story than to feed whatever impulse made Murakami write it.
In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, a young woman describes her sexual assault in graphic detail. It’s a scene so jarring it should freeze the entire novel in place. Instead, Murakami moves past it almost immediately, returning to Tsukuru’s gloom as if her assault were nothing more than a brief stop along his path. Another young woman’s suffering added as if Murakami just couldn’t resist one more trip to the same well.
At a certain point, you can’t keep pretending it’s coincidence. Nearly all of Murakami’s major novels revolve around young girls—their bodies, innocence, vulnerability—described in lingering detail that has nothing to do with plot or character and everything to do with his obsession. It’s not an occasional odd scene. It’s everywhere. Book after book.
If a Western writer published this many scenes of adult men closing in on teenage girls, lingering over school-aged bodies, and dressing up predatory moments as “dreamlike” metaphysics, his career would be radioactive. No tours. No awards. No Manhattan celebrations. The backlash would be immediate and potentially career-ending. Yet Murakami sails past all of it, protected by the fact that he’s a foreign literary darling whose surrealism is treated as a free pass. What would destroy a Western writer somehow becomes “art” when he does it.
None of this means Murakami lacks talent. He may be the finest mood-builder alive. The late-night rooms, the stray jazz notes, the solitary men boiling pasta at two a.m. But craft doesn’t excuse the content, and what he puts on the page is impossible to ignore.
Murakami’s defenders wave away the discomfort.
“It’s metaphor,” they insist.
“It’s surrealism,” they argue.
“It’s symbolism,” they cry.
But that’s nonsense, a disingenuous attempt to pretend the pages don’t say exactly what they say. What’s astonishing is how rarely anyone in the mainstream literary world wants to talk about it. Murakami’s been canonized as a benign oddball: the gentle marathon runner, the bar-owner turned literary sage. It’s time to rethink that image. Decades of praise built the pedestal. No one ever checked what it was propping up.