The Discourse: Ryu Spaeth

Cancel Culture Grows Up Have we figured out how to separate the repugnant from the merely unlucky?

MY FAVORITE SOCIAL-MEDIA CONTROVERSY of recent vintage was a September 15 post on X (the rebranded Twitter) by the esteemed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami that read, "As a writer, you can write as much as you want until forty or so, while youth is on your side. But after that, it's common for people to lose energy, and their writing suffers as a result. Generally speaking." Many of those on the wrong side of that magic number took grave offense. "Almost every hour of TV I gave to HBO came between 40 and 60, so nah, I'll be pumping good pages when I'm gumming food and falling down stairs," huffed The Wire's David Simon. When people weren't cataloguing the achievements Toni Morrison, John le Carré, and other luminaries had notched in their middle to later years, they were calling Murakami sexist, classist, and ageist for failing to recognize that not everyone has the ability to take such advantage of their youth.

The problem was that Murakami had said no such thingor not really. The account under his name is a bot that spews Murakami content (photos of his work desk, koanlike reflections, cat memes), and in this case, it had mangled some benign remark he had made to Uniqlo's LifeWear magazine about taking up running to maintain his energy in his old age. The dark cloud of fury and indignation that swirled around this stray comment, the hundreds of accusations that this 74-year-old man did not know what it was like to be a woman or a poor person or, uh, an elderly artist, and the presumption that anyone should care what Haruki Murakami thinks about this subject in the first placeall seemed indicative of where the conversation around identity politics has ultimately landed, so much heat and light surrounding an empty core.