SHORT STORIES

Men without Women

Haruki Murakami

Published: August 2017

Publisher: Random House UK

Pages : 240 pages (hardcover)

 

 

Haruki Murakami, as the master of strangeness and surrealism, might more than occasionally leave us confused by blurring the lines between reality and dreams in his stories. But the seemingly connected tales in this recent collection of short stories, ‘Men Without Women’, Murakami’s first in more than a decade, feel a lot more developed and realistic compared to the surreal stories in Murakami’s 2006 collection ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’. In ‘Men Without Women’, as his characters try to grapple with the fact that they are alone, Murakami, for the first time, doesn’t roman­ticize the concept of being lonely. Instead, the stories are about love, loss, and pain—the very elements that are the driving forces of life. And though it feels un-Murakami like, it’s a refreshing change for those who have had a little too much of the writer’s obsessions with jazz, whiskey drinkers at bars, and van­ishing cats—though there are hints of these in ‘Men Without Women’ too.

 

Most of the middle-aged men in these seven tales, four of which have been previously published, have lost the women in their lives—to other men or death, and they are thus lonely.

 

This puts them in a situation Murakami terms ‘Men Without Women’. Though the stories are essentially about men and nar­rated by men, women hold an important place in each of the tales, even though they remain somewhat mysterious.

 

In the first story, an actor, whose wife has died, hires a young woman driver to take him to the theater and bring him back home. During the commute, he talks about how he was always faithful to his wife, even though she had many lovers. He even confesses that he took to meet­ing one of them at bars to talk about her and somehow get his revenge but, in the end, manages to rise above it.

 

There is another story where a housewife visits a man at his retire­ment home to bring his groceries and then they have sex, following which she tells him bizarre sto­ries. Then there is an unmarried 50-something plastic surgeon with a long list of girlfriends with whom he enjoys wine, conversation, and sex, ‘a discreet pleasure but never the goal’, until he falls hopelessly in love with one of them.

 

In yet another story, a man gets a call at one in the morning from the husband of a former girlfriend, whom he has not been in touch with for years, to tell him she has commit­ted suicide.

 

Studies say loneliness can be lethal. In ‘Men without Women’ it is said to be deep-seated like ‘a red wine stain on a pastel carpet’. And while that might be true, the varied ways in which the characters in the stories deal with it make you realize that, while loneliness is at the crux of our existence and there is no escaping it, we will all eventually find a way to embrace it.