Detached feelings, missing pieces
Men Without Women: Stories By Haruki Murakami Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Bond Street Books 240 pp. $ 29.95
Haruki Murakami is a master of the open- ended mystery.
Whether in c omplex, dreamlike novels like The Wind- up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, or the more realistic short stories in his latest collection, Men Without Women, Murakami is drawn to the abiding strangeness and unfathomability of life.
His meandering, mesmerizing tales of profound alienation are driven by puzzling circumstances that neither his characters nor readers can crack — recalling existentialist Gabriel Marcel’s assertion that “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced.”
Most of the perplexed middle- aged men in these seven plain- spoken tales have l ost t he women in their lives — to other men or death. This lands them in a condition Murakami labels “Men Without Women” — always in “a relentlessly frigid plural.” These subdued, unemotional creatures of habit bear little resemblance to the bullfighters and prizefighters who populate Hemingway’s Men Without Women, published in 1927. Detached from their feelings and missing pieces of themselves, Murakami’s l onely souls struggle to understand what has hit them. Unexpected connections with strangers shed light, though the illumination is often indirect or partial.
The title story — although too abstract to move us — provides a key to the book. A man is awakened at one in the morning by a jarring call from the husband of a former girlfriend, who tells him she has committed suicide. He had not been in contact with the woman for years, and he ponders the motivation for the husband’s baffling, brief call.
“It seemed his intention was to leave me stuck somewhere in the middle, dangling between knowledge and ignorance. But why? To get me thinking about something?”
This s uspended s t ate “dangling between knowledge and ignorance” is common territory for Murakami’s characters.
The thematically connected tales in Men Without Women are generally more developed, more realistic and more sentimental than the surreal stories in Murakami’s 2006 collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, many of which blurred the line between dreams and reality.
Two of the strongest stories borrow Beatles titles. In Drive My Car, a successful actor who has lost his wife to cancer hires a competent, young female driver when his l i cence i s suspended after a minor accident — involving, significantly, a blind spot in his vision. The woman is deft at shifting both automotive and conversational gears. After months of driving in silence, she reveals aspects of her unhappy childhood, and he opens up about his painful discovery of his wife’s multiple affairs and his frustration that he will never fully understand her, even after pursuing an odd relationship with the last of her lovers in the hope of finding some answers.
Yesterday is one of two stories in which a writer named Tanimura recalls people who made an impact on him. Kitaru was a rare friend during Tanimura’s lonely sophomore year in college. A brilliant eccentric who failed the college entrance exams twice and alienated his girlfriend, Kitaru spent his time mastering a provincial Japanese dialect and making up weird alternate lyrics to the titular Beatles song.
Several stories involve men hiding against unexplained danger. In Scheherazade, a young man confined to a safe house looks forward to visits from his assigned “support liaison,” a housewife who delivers groceries and library books followed by impassive sex.
As the members of Murakami’s lonely hearts club band discover in these affecting stories, life, however baffling, is better shared.