Murakami’s latest aches with loneliness

Loneliness, studies show, can be lethal. But while most of us won’t die of being alone, many will experience, at some point, the dull, gnawing ache of it. This ache pulsates through each of the seven stories in Haruki Murakami’s newest collection, “Men Without Women.” In every one, a male protagonist suffers the loss of a woman he loves or is compelled to recognize that he’ll never have her in the first place.

But unfulfilled or disappointed romantic longing are just devices in stories whose real subject is a loneliness so profound, it “seeps deep down inside your body, like a red-wine stain on a pastel carpet,” which, though it “might fade a bit over time … will still remain, as a stain, until the day you draw your final breath.” That is the conclusion drawn by the protagonist of the collection’s title story, a grown man who learns that a girlfriend from junior high has committed suicide. Though many years have elapsed since they broke up, and they’ve had been no contact in the interim, the man, now married, considers himself the “second loneliest man on the planet,” reserving first place for the woman’s husband.

In the suggestively titled “An Independent Organ,” a cosmetic plastic surgeon named Dr. Tokai is perfectly content with his successful albeit superficial life. Having decided against marriage and family, Tokai instead maintains casual relationships with multiple women. Many of these women are already in committed relationships, which helps to ward off the possibility of anything serious developing, until, of course, it does. There is nothing exceptional about the woman Tokai falls for, but he falls hard. Suddenly, along with the unfamiliar feeling of love, there is a terrible dread brought on by the fear of losing her, though he knows that as a married woman with a child she is all but lost to him already. The burst of feelings also brings about a dawning awareness of his existential loneliness, and he finds himself wondering: “Who in the world am I?”

One of the strongest stories in the collection is “Scherezade,” about Habara, a man who lives in virtual isolation except for twice-weekly visits by a woman whose job it is to buy groceries and procure whatever else he needs. Though not part of her job description, the woman soon begins to have sex with him, as if it were her job. The sex is not passionate, but it is not joyless either, and the highlight is what comes after: The stories she tells, stories that dazzle her listener so that he begins to call her Scherezade, after the queen in “One Thousand and One Nights.” Habara is quickly overcome by a fear of losing the woman in his life. It isn’t just the sex that he is afraid of losing, but everything the woman represents for him, like offering moments of connection and “the opportunity to be embraced by reality, on the one hand, while negating it entirely on the other.”

In each story, male desire is glorified under the guise of existential loneliness, and the women’s function is reduced to that of potential saviors. Not surprisingly, female characters in this collection are never fully realized.

Given the author’s penchant for stories about loneliness and alienation, the recurring allusions to Kafka in Murakami’s work are not surprising. His Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel, “Kafka on the Shore,” paid homage to the author. In this collection, “Samsa in Love” reimagines Kafka’s most famous work, “The Metamorphosis,” in which the main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect. In Murakami’s version, the metamorphosis is reversed and an unidentified creature is inexplicably transformed into Gregor Samsa.