Pomegranates

 My younger self was quite ambivalent about pomegranates. My dad (ever industrious) would break into the pomegranate and methodically rip out the seeds, as quickly as possible, depositing them into a bowl for my family to consume, which I did half heartedly. The little seeds were unpleasant and stuck in my teeth, and the juicy flesh was pretty to look at and tasty enough, but nothing special really.

It turns out the problem wasn’t the pomegranate. The problem was me. I had been doing it wrong. 

As an adult, I had the opportunity to buy and consume my own pomegranates. Dear reader, I will tell you what I learned about the perfect (and as far as I am concerned the only) way to eat pomegranate.

Rather than sawing it in half, as my dad had done for us, use a paring knife to make a shallow cut into the fruit, just through the pith but no further, all the way around, and then into sections.

Then, using your fingers, penetrate through the loamy white flesh with your fingers, extracting a segment of pomegranate studded with scarlet arils dripping juice, and exposing the cavernous inside, with fruit glistening like so many garnets in a pithy cave. Take a moment to appreciate the beauty. Glorious. 

Reader, when you attempt this yourself be sure to do it over a large plate or a cutting board. The mess is important here. Give yourself permission to make one.

Continue to use your fingers to extract sections of the fruit, roughly if necessary. Delicately tease the pith away from the arils with the tips of your fingers, lick the scarlet juice that accumulates on your fingertips and suck the fruit away from the pith in large luscious gulps. 

Juice and pith and peel and arils are everywhere, but it is the pure unadulterated pleasure that is key now, the rhythmic prying and sucking and hits of sugar, and penetrating still deeper into fruit yet unclaimed, the rapture, oh the rapture…

Phew. It’s intense. 

While I was staying with my parents I mentioned this newfound love of pomegranate and my mother bought me a package of pre-peeled pomegranate, to my disappointment. As you may have guessed, the pleasure in eating pomegranate comes from the chase, the challenge, the conquest of penetrating to the interior and extracting the fruit myself. Take that away, and all you have are seedy arils and the lackluster pomegranate experience of my childhood. 

At some point in my pomegranate guzzling, it occurred to me (who could’ve seen it coming) that this must be what men feel like when they — ahem — “take” — a woman’s virginity.

I am referring here to, of course, The Myth of Female Virginity, this idea that women have interior treasures that can be penetrated and taken by men, the myth of the youthful and blushing bride, dressed in white, endless comparisons to fruit and flowers and whatnot expounded in length in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. 

Here, with only a pomegranate, I am able to at least partially recreate the myth. Of course, with none of the institutional power or historical relevance that The Myth of the Virgin has enjoyed, but as I am sating myself with my pom conquest, I get it. I can feel it too.

And for perhaps the first time in my (albeit extremely privileged life) I feel myself to be the Beauvoirian Subject in a sensual encounter, acting upon an Other (my pom) to transcend my emptiness and find at least for the moment a fickle reason for existing. 

Fighting words for the existentialist. Beauvoir’s entire argument in The Second Sex hinges upon the idea that existents in general are empty— without an inherent being or meaning, and defined only by their choices. Men, like all humans, must define themselves by making authentic choices for themselves, but have instead historically opted for the easier route of striving towards meaning by subjugating, controlling, conquering, an Other— a passive person who, like a child, allows all her decisions to be made for her. As she meticulously argues, women are historically and socially primed for that role. In other words, our cultural and social institutions have led us to internalize that it’s a man’s world, and we’re just existing in it for their benefit. 

She argues that the Myth of Virginity (and other myths) are essential to keeping women in the place of Other, as existential fodder for the male gaze. By ingraining in us that women have something that can be taken, or corrupted, some idea of innocence or purity, society prevents women from being adventurous enough, bold enough to assert her own independence and live authentically as a human, not an idea or an Other. “The myth of Woman substitutes for an authentic relationship with an autonomous existent the immobile contemplation of a mirage.” She says.

The whole first half of her book is devoted to understanding such myths, picking them apart and where they may have come from. Because it’s only by understanding them that we can reject them and claim our place as existents with just as much a right to meaning as men.

I have been lucky to live a few years beyond Beauvoir, in a world where a woman not being able to vote is scandalous and where sex happens between two consenting adults who should have equal amounts of agency, not a dude deflowering some fruit or flower metaphor. 

In existential terms, I have very rarely felt being the Other as viscerally or as ardently as Beauvoir must have felt, or countless women during and before her time. But I have also never felt the privilege of being a Subject dominating an Other. 

Until I ate pomegranate.

Maybe that’s why Persephone did it and doomed us to winter (or maybe that’s why the men who invented the myth made such a big deal out of a woman eating three measly pomegranate seeds). If we’re feeling generous, eating a pomegranate in its own small way is an expression of sexual and feminine freedom. 

As a final caveat, you don't have to be a woman to enjoy the sensation of objectifying something. Anyone who has also never experienced the dominant end of the Myth of Virginity who would also find a pomegranate experience enlightening. For that matter, it doesn't even have to be a pomegranate. Grapefruit, peaches (though overdone), even concord grapes might do the trick for you. The trick is to feel entitled to take the literal fruits of your labor with whatever you do eat.

So, in conclusion: buy a pomegranate. Eat it the right way. Learn about and engage in a myth that has subjugated women for eons, without repercussions (because this is an actual object). And have fun :) 

Why I'm done with Murakami

I recently finished reading Kafka on the Shore and was deeply disappointed by it. I wrote a review on Goodreads which ended up being long enough and comprehensive enough that I thought I would post it here, too -- the reason I don't plan on reading any more books by Haruki Murakami. So, here we go: 

This is not my first Murakami rodeo. I've read 1Q84, Wind-Up Bird, and several short story anthologies before Kafka on the Shore. And from my first few encounters, I too was blown away by the worlds the he creates, the stories unlike any that I’d read before - captivating, metaphorical, surreal, the whole gamut. But Kafka on the Shore is the Murakami that finally triggered my utter disillusionment with Murakami. The straw that broke the camel's (cat's?) proverbial back. 

Of course, the book has many good points - like its companions, it's famous because of its compelling magical realism, flowing descriptions/details, delicate narrative, etc., etc. His vivid writing is what propelled me to finish all five-hundred or so pages, and not regret doing so. I won't spend any time discussing this because other readers have done so at great lengths. 

The reason for my disillusionment: I am sick and tired of the strange, sexual trends that crop up in Murakami books that lead me to believe that we are actually reading - not some deep metaphor - but sick fantasies of his that he dresses up in literary tulle to justify, well, their sickness. Let me explain the trend I see: 

In every work of Murakami's that I have read, we have our Typical Murakami Lead: a precocious "gentle giant"-type young man who, according to the narrator, lacks any sort of agency and just sort of “floats along” in life. Here, it is Kafka Tamura, a jacked 15 year old boy who runs away from home.

In addition to the Murakami Lead, we have the supporting cast of Murakami Women who are all beautiful, slim, small, eat very little if at all, and seem to know more about things than the Lead. There are two main women who play this role in this book: Sakura and Miss Saeki.

And in every work that I have read, there is inevitably at least one scene where one of the Murakami Women engage in strange sexual activity with the Lead for reasons he can’t understand. Now, here’s the subtle point: because Murakami writes these leads in the position of “I don’t know what’s going on” and “I can’t control my body or this situation” in a fantastical setting where even we don’t understand all the rules, and because these Murakami Women seem to know more about the strange situation than the Leads, any sexual gratification that happens for the Leads is written up as something that’s out of their control, no matter how problematic the actual acts are. 

I can swallow this (and I have! In other works) if it happens infrequently, and the sexual activity actually means something in the broader scheme of the narrative. But with Murakami, these scenes are such a staple in his work that, when I found them again in this book, I finally listened to that uncomfortable angry feeling inside. 

And it’s particularly bad in Kafka on the Shore, partly because Miss Saeki (a fifty year old woman) and Sakura are heavily hinted to be Kafka’s mother and sister, respectively. In one memorable scene, Miss Saeki sleepwalks to Kafka’s room and initiates sex with him. “I figure I’d better wake her up. She’s making a big mistake, and I have to let her know… But everything’s happening so fast, and I don’t have the strength to resist,” Kafka thinks, as this little sleepwalking lady essentially “forces” him to have sex. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it,” we read when he penetrates her. 

Sure, you can chalk this up to narrative demand and say something like, “but Kafka actually didn’t have the strength to resist, it’s magical realism!” But narrative demand or not, this is rape, and it’s rape that has been written to absolve the male characters of any culpability. 

Something similar happens between Kafka and Sakura. While she is sleeping he undresses her and penetrates her, and thinks to himself, “No, actually I haven’t made up my mind about anything. Making up your mind means you have a choice, and I don’t.” Meanwhile, Sakura verbally tells him not to do it. “Stop already. Get out of me.” She says. Yes, this is a dream and technically not “real,” but in a book where “reality” doesn’t really mean anything, it’s a significant action that Murakami chose to write into the book. And he chose to write a scene where the Lead, again, absolves himself from any culpability because of the situation he’s in (it’s just a dream!) and proceeds with violating a woman who cries, and herself calls it rape. 

Why were these sex/rape scenes necessary? The book tells us to fit into some Oedipal trope, a “prophesy” that Kafka receives but is never fully fleshed out. An explanation that is not only unsatisfying, but also downright inexplicable. Oedipus continuously fought against his prophesy. He struggled his entire life against it, and at the end fulfilled it because of that very struggle. That’s why he’s sympathetic. Kafka on the other hand, I don’t sympathize with. Where is the struggle? Where is the grappling with the truth of his actions? There are no repercussions, no reckoning. 

It’s fine to write about rape, or sexual deviance. But Murakami protects his characters (who are aware of their actions) from facing any sort of moral quandary using the very medium of magic realism itself. And this happens so consistently, across multiple books, that I’ve reached my breaking point. I’m done with it.

Just to give a third example, there’s the scene between Hoshino (not Kafka, but the example is illustrative nevertheless) and an unnamed female college philosophy major. Hoshino is told that he must have sex with the philosophy major in order to get the information he needs. So he shrugs his shoulders and proceeds to have mind-blowingly good sex with a crazy hot philosophy major, all while ignoring her philosophical commentary. And we have no idea at the end of this why it was necessary. It just was. Again, same tropes: a Murakami Man, written to have no agency or culpability, having strange sex with a Murakami Woman for no good reason. 

It gets to the point where I wonder whether these situations were written as an outlet for some kind of rape/sexual fantasy - because this theme of a man saying, “oh no, but I have no control, you have all the control,” happens so frequently across all of his works. 

All I want are female characters in Murakami’s books to have real agency and emotions, not to be instruments in fulfilling male sexual fantasies. Aomame in 1Q84 is probably the closest example of a satisfying Murakami Woman that I can think of, and even she was implicated in all sorts of weirdness. And in Kafka on the Shore, God forbid, that strange scene with the caricatured “feminists” entering the library, well, doesn’t cut it. 

There’s a lot to love in Murakami’s work, but at this point, all of it is overshadowed by my constant fear that I will stumble across a strange sexual encounter that will leave me uncomfortable and angry. This book marks the peak of my disillusionment, and it will take a lot to get me to read another Murakami.