Men Without Women (2014)
Haruki Murakami (1949)
228 pages
A well-known admonition warns: ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ Though generally a comment on the quality of the book based how its cover may look, if we take the meaning more broadly to cover also a book’s theme, then one could make an exception for the English hardcover edition of Haruki Murakami’s book of short stories, Men Without Women.
As shown in the picture above, the cover image has a shadowed representation of the upper body of a man, with a puzzle piece missing from roughly where his heart would be; that piece appears off to his side, as if leaving him behind. It’s a clean and crisp cover that accurately reflects Murakami’s writing style, but that also goes directly to the theme of the seven captivating stories in this collection, in which men discover, sometimes years after, the impact a woman has had on their life.In the opening story, Drive My Car, an actor with glaucoma can no longer drive, and so hires a young woman as a driver. Despite her taciturn nature, the time they spend together in the car leads to the development of an unspoken trust between them. When the driver at one point begins questioning the actor about his life, it becomes the stepping off point for him to reveal a deeply held secret about his long dead wife, one that clearly still weighs heavily on him, though it has been almost a decade since she passed away from a sickness.
In Scheherazade, a man with an unspecified illness that apparently makes it impossible for him to leave the house has a nurse who visits a couple of times a week. She brings food and other necessities, but also initiates a routine of sleeping with him during each visit. The sex is mostly perfunctory, but what stands out for the man are the stories the nurse tells him of her life as they lie together after intercourse. The stories tend to stretch over many visits, and the man comes to value hearing them more deeply than he initially realizes.
The title character of Kino, after catching his wife sleeping with a colleague, has separated from her and opened up a small out-of-the-way bar. He seems to feel little pain or hurt over what happened with his wife, settling into a quiet life, without any consideration for either his past or future. Then a mysterious man who has become a regular at his bar forces him to confront his loss. The title story closes out the book. In it, a man learns that a woman he had dated some years before has killed herself. Despite the fact that years have passed, and he has remarried, the sudden loss of his earlier love shocks him, leading him into a surreal recollection of his time with her. His memories morph wildly into alternate histories of their relationship, and why and how it ended.
I’ve read two other of Murakami’s works of fiction, After Dark (my review here) and IQ84 (my review here), and the slightly off-kilter reality that I discovered and enjoyed so much in those earlier works is present in this new collection also. For me, it has a bit of a feel of the technique sometimes used in science fiction films, in which a scene is tilted a few degrees to imply a slightly altered reality. The characters clearly exist in a larger world that seems quite normal; but they themselves seem to experience their lives as slightly disconnected from what goes on around them.
It is this engaging style that keeps bringing me back to Murakami’s work.
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