Men Without Women Review

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10

I’ve only read one other book by Murakami, 1Q84, and both were equally hard to put down. The faint magical realism (I would hesitate even to call it that) that appears in his short stories sucks you into discussions about the relationships between men and women, or more precisely, how a man moves on with his life after losing a woman.

The stories start out light-hearted and become more and more existential, but there is a constant theme of loneliness that underscores the entire collection. There is also a recurring theme of women having extramarital affairs. Murakami was greatly influenced by western culture, perhaps most notably by Kafka, and this influence emanates throughout his work. There is a short story called “Samsa In Love”, a reversal of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which (presumably) a bug wakes up in a human’s body and discovers all of the awkward movements, feelings, and relationships a human must contend with in everyday life.

Here are the titles of the short stories, just so I can have a reference if I ever forget: Drive My Car, Yesterday, An Independent Organ, Scheherazade, Kino, Samsa in Love, and Men Without Women.

I think my favorite short story was Drive My Car. In Drive My Car, Kafuku, a B-rate actor, gets a new female chauffeur. His outlook on life is very binary: female drivers are either “a little too aggressive or a little too timid”; drinkers came in two flavors: “those who drank to enhance their personalities, and those who sought to rid themselves of something”. He can’t drive because of glaucoma, which is ironic because he described himself as having a “sixth sense” that alerted him to his wife’s licentious tendencies. After his wife’s death, he befriends his wife’s last lover with the intention of provoking some sort of guilty feeling, but ends up becoming good friends with him. Similarly, he treats his new female chauffeur as just another female driver, but ends up realizing that she doesn’t fit into either of his two prescribed categories. I liked this story because the message was that people are complex, and though it’s easy and justified to view the world in a simplified binary way, people will never fit into the categories you’ve created.

I enjoyed all of the short stories, however, and I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Murakami’s style (or maybe just surrealism/fatalism).