‘MEN WITHOUT WOMEN’: HARUKI MURAKAMI’S LONELY UNIVERSE
Haruki Murakami’s lonely universe of short stories
In “Drive My Car,” one of two stories named after Beatles tunes in Haruki Murakami’s “Men Without Women,” a divorced actor whose ex-wife has died becomes friends with one of her many lovers. Over drinks one night, the actor, whose theater company has hired a young woman to chauffeur him after he loses his license over a drunk-driving incident, confesses that he may not have fully known his wife, that there was something inside her he must have missed.
The ex-lover asks, “Can any of us ever perfectly understand another person?” — a question that could easily have come from many of the men depicted in this collection.
And that’s the main theme that connects these seven stories: In relationships as much as when driving, each of us has blind spots. The challenge is to be aware of them and check them now and then to prevent a damaging collision.
That the male characters are more likely to ask this question than the women tells you something about the worldview you’ll encounter here, as is Mr. Murakami’s tendency to describe women’s features in unflattering detail. The young driver, for example, has “something offputting about her face” and protruding ears “like satellite dishes placed in some remote landscape.”
As in much of Mr. Murakami’s fiction, “Men Without Women” is a male gaze onto the world or, to be more accurate, the gaze of the type of male who views women primarily as sexual beings inclined to have affairs, such as the married nurse in “Scheherazade,” who sleeps with a younger man unable to leave his house and tells him elaborate stories after their liaisons, like the one about her having been a lamprey eel in a former life.
And then there are the men who make derisive comments about the women they covet, as when the middle-aged never-married cosmetic plastic surgeon with a preference for married women in “An Independent Organ” says, “Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie.”
The title of this book may be the same as that of Hemingway’s 1927 collection, but the prose is more in the style of writers like Robert B. Parker, whose Spenser detective novels married philosophical musings with macho dialogue and action.
When, in “Yesterday,” a young waiter who struggles to pass his university entrance exams asks a college student acquaintance to take his girlfriend out to dinner, the girlfriend bites off a piece of pizza “the size of a large postage stamp,” exactly the sort of line Parker would use to describe Susan Silverman, Spenser’s love interest.
Some readers may be surprised that only a couple of these stories dabble in the surrealism for which Mr. Murakami is famous. The best is “Samsa in Love,” in which the protagonist awakens in an unfamiliar room in Prague to discover that he has been turned into Gregor Samsa and wonders what happened to his protective shell.
Most of the familiar Murakami elements are here: cats, baseball, classic jazz by the likes of Teddy Wilson and Clifford Brown. If these stories don’t break new ground for Mr. Murakami, they still offer a thought-provoking peek into a certain type of male psyche.
As the male acquaintance says to his waiter friend’s girlfriend during their date, “If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s not easy to look for it.” No doubt many of the men in this collection know exactly what he means.