WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MURAKAMI

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN: STORIES By Haruki Murakami 228 pages Available at National Book Store and Fully Booked

If you think of the imagination of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami as a faucet, then the tap alternates between drips, trickles, and large

tabo-filling gushes. He’s penned both doorstop novels and slight novellas, personal essays and nonfiction accounts of events in Tokyo. And of course, short stories. His fourth collection, Men

Without Women, seems to take off from one of his acknowledged influences, Raymond Carver, whose short story collection What We Talk About

When We Talk About Love tackled the subject under various guises. But Murakami is not so much interested in the nature of true love, rather in its absence: when something essential to man, in this case, is uprooted or removed. Sometimes violently, sometimes with a quiet, enduring ache.

The seven stories here wander around the theme but never stray far, from the opening “Drive My Car” (about a widower who learns his deceased wife slept with his best friend), through the ruminations on love’s mysteries in “Yesterday,” “An Independent Organ” and “Scheherazade” (about a woman who tells stories to her lover about breaking into and entering a former high school classmate’s bedroom).

What remains familiar in Murakami’s fiction is his usual touch points: Beatles songs (two stories named after them), jazz, whiskey, cats, snakes (sometimes all in one story). Men Without

Women riffs on Carver, but also Raymond Chandler and Hemingway (the faux-noir opening of “Kino” is like an ode to Papa’s noir short story “The Killers”), not to mention Kafka (the character in the first story is named Kafuku, plus the what-happened-next scenario of “Samsa in Love” echoes “The Metamorphosis”), plus David Lynch (just about everywhere, somewhere in the margins). None of this feels like parody or homage; rather, Murakami deftly recombines those influences, as he has often does, to view things through a prism of Japanese surrealism.

But always at the heart there’s a mystery: the puzzle piece missing, the absence of the “other half,” and what effect this has on men, and sometimes women in these stories. “Drive My Car” puts Kafuku, a successful stage actor, in the passenger seat, having hired a laconic but very professional woman driver to take him around to his theater gigs. Hearing about his deceitful wife, she hints at the gap between what we think we know about our partners, and what really transpires in the heart (“Isn’t it possible she didn’t fall for your friend at all? And that’s why she slept with him?”).

There’s a danger of seeing only deceit and hidden female motives, and a whiff of sexism arises in stories like “An Independent Organ,” as in when a certain Dr. Tokai muses on the nature of women: Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie… At a certain point in their lives, all women tell lies, and they lie about important things. They lie about unimportant things too, but they also don’t hesitate to lie about the most important things. And when they do, most women’s expressions and voices don’t change at all, since it’s not them lying, but this independent organ they’re equipped with that’s acting on its own.

Combine this with the lamprey eel and snake imagery in other stories, plus the existence of an innocent willow tree in one character’s childhood, and Murakami’s imagination wanders dangerously close to Adam and Eve/ Original Sin territory. Whether this is imbedded in his conscious or subconscious as a writer is for others to unravel. But in the end, the stories don’t seek to lay blame for deception or lapses, so much as seek a reconnection, a path to healing the heart. (“Heart” is a word that pops up a lot in these stories.)

Murakami’s stories often pit a quiet, buttoned-down character against a loose-lipped, unconventional motormouth, as he does with the male buddy in “Yesterday” (an old college pal tries to get the narrator to sleep with his unrequited childhood crush because he’d rather she date someone he can stand); but there’s sometimes an unconventional female, such as the beguiling storyteller in “Scheherazade.” Her storytelling skills are also snakelike, in that her casual lover becomes mesmerized by the ongoing tale of theft and obsession each time they meet up to make love.

Murakami’s narrator’s are like detectives, trying to piece out the mystery of women — our fascination with their habits and their rituals — in simple, casual observations such as this one about a partner dressing up again after an afternoon tryst: “It struck him that the way women put on their clothes could be even more interesting than the way they took them off.”

Whereas some male writers might go for an ironic tone here, Murakami simply states it with an air of bemusement.

The three final stories in Men Without Women are more experimental. There’s the fantastical three-part “Kino” (a story about a yakuza confrontation in a jazz bar overlaps with an unusual hookup and an infestation of — wait for it — snakes). Then the sly continuation of Gregor Samsa’s fate in “The Metamorphosis” is picked up in war-torn Prague, involving a new conception of beauty and how it beckons a man to become a man again (with shades of Carson McCuller’s “Sad Café” in the hunchbacked woman). As ill-advised as a “sequel” to Kafka’s story might appear, Murakami pulls off an emotional trump that makes it worth the visit. The concluding title story lacks oomph, but does contain one of Murakami’s more rapturous passages, alluding to the condition at hand:

Only Men Without Women can comprehend how painful, how heartbreaking, it is to become one. You lose that wonderful west wind. Fourteen is stolen away from you forever. (A billion years should count as forever.) The far-off, weary lament of the sailors. The bottom of the sea, with the ammonites and coelacanths. Calling someone’s house past one a.m. Getting a call after one a.m. from a stranger. Waiting for someone you don’t know somewhere between knowledge and ignorance. Tears falling on the dry road as you check the pressure of your tires. It’s in such passages that we glimpse Murakami’s true heart beating.