Men without Women

Author: Haruki Murakami Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf ISBN: 9780451494627

HARUKI MURAKAMI’S collection of short stories in this book is revealing, as each of the seven stories here is a gem in and of its own right, while working around the collection’s central theme of loneliness.

“You are a pastel-coloured Persian carpet, and loneliness is a Bordeaux wine stain that won’t come out,” explains the narrator of the final story, who counts himself as one of the titular Men.

These figures take on a different guise in each of the tales.

There is a widowed actor, musing on his dead wife’s affairs; a student who couldn’t bring himself to go all the way with his girlfriend, pimping her out instead to his friend; and a lovesick plastic surgeon who starves himself to death after reading a book about the Holocaust.

There is also a single man under some form of house arrest, sleeping with his housekeeper; a divorced man who begins life again as a lonely barkeep; Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, transformed from insect into man, finding his feet in an unfamiliar world and thrown off them again by sexual desire; and a man whose girlfriends keep committing suicide.

They’re more than simply men without women though; they recognise an impossible gulf between the sexes.

“I don’t think we can ever understand all that a woman is thinking,” Kafuku, the actor who pretended all was well with his marriage, declares.

His attitude is echoed by the doctor who wants to “reduce himself to nothing”, or the bar- owner who feels disconnected from reality, fearful that he “doesn’t exist”, or the student who professes to be someone he isn’t by means of an acquired accent.

The prose is clear and refined and the stories hit home by means of a single arresting sentence, the shock of a completely unanticipated eventuality – an otherwise sensible, cultured man refusing to eat, for example – or the lingering sense of expectant incompleteness.

Slightly at odds with the realism of the other tales, Murakami’s take on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis should jar our senses, but instead, it’s a rather delightful foray into the surreal that perfectly complements the melancholic, haunting tones of the other works. – The Independent