Tess

The book was more interesting to me due to the fact of its publishing and what the author had to go through than the actual book (though the endnotes in my copy about the real-life people she had based the characters on were fascinating as well).

This is a series of interconnected magical realism short stories about the ways that women are oppressed in Iran (and elsewhere). A woman is fired from her job after refusing advances from her boss. A woman is murdered by her brother because she left the house without his permission. Two women are attacked on the road for the crime of being unaccompanied women who want to explore the world. A woman who had been sold into prostitution as a teenager starts having strange visions. A woman with big dreams accidentally kills her awful husband in what she thinks is self-defence. They are all eventually drawn to the same place where they live together briefly and then all go their separate ways. The ending kind of disappointed me for that reason. I was hoping to see them find a new way together but they couldn't get along. 

From the blurb, I had expected this book to be a thriller but it isn't, really. It's mostly long-winded meanderings of an unpleasant character, full of pettiness and weird gender essentialism (I got so sick of seeing “why do all women”), then a bloated middle section of flashbacks involving her missing all of the red flags in her relationship. I liked the hopefulness of the resolution but it took way too long to get there.

This got a little didactic in places (felt like each character was created to address a specific issue), I didn't really care for the murder mystery side plot, and everything got a little too fantastical for me at the end, but overall I enjoyed this book about Filipino domestic workers in Singapore a lot. How do you live as a human in these circumstances is a question that each character is trying to answer in her own way.

This book really disappointed me. All of the characters sound fascinating in theory, and I liked the parallel universes idea, but the writing was just really bad. Important points are reiterated over and over like the reader might not be paying attention, and plot points are over-explained (there is a part in book 3 where the POV characters are constantly missing each other and the narration is constantly telling you exactly when they passed each other by even though it's obvious - it made me feel like Murakami thinks his readers are idiots). 

All of the characters talk about taking control but just get pushed around by the narrative. Most of them hardly do anything at all.

The writing around underage girls is gross, especially a plot contrivance which allows a major character (who is a teacher!!) to have guilt-free sex with a teenage girl. All of the female characters are written very poorly and described by their breasts even when they are dead.

The romance that is basically the whole point of the book is ridiculous.

This book was fine, but it didn't feel like it had a lot of depth. The essays felt a bit like blog posts and were a bit too “of course not all men” to me.