Suddenly one day you become Men Without Women. The day comes to you completely out of the blue. Without the faintest of warnings or hints beforehand. No premonitions or foreboding, no knocks or clearing of the throats. Turn a corner and you know you're already there. But by then there's no going back. Once you round that bend, that is the only world you can possibly inhabit. In that world you are called “Men Without Women”. Always a relentlessly frigid plural. (Men Without Women)I'm a longtime fan of Haruki Murakami – and particularly of his early, surrealist work – and have sadly found myself underwhelmed by his latest efforts (I'm looking at you, Colorless Tsukuru). And as Men Without Women is a book of short stories, I can only say that I liked them to varying degrees; I have no idea if they'd be of particular interest to the non-longtime fan of Murakami's work. While the writing is, naturally, superb, few of these stories gave me that mental buzz that a really finely-crafted short story can evoke, and as an examination of “men without women”, I couldn't help but notice that the focus seems very narrowly trained. There's not a huge variety of experience here: wives cheat and husbands find themselves alone – whether due to death or divorce – leaving the men literally untethered:
It feels like somehow our hearts have become intertwined. Like when she feels something, my heart moves in tandem. Like we're two boats tied together with rope. Even if you want to cut the rope, there's no knife sharp enough to do it. (An Independent Organ)
He had never experienced anything like this before: he didn't love her, and the sex wasn't all that passionate, but he was so closely tied – one could even say sewn – to her physically. It was all rather confusing. (Scheherazade)
The most he could do was create a place where his heart – devoid now of any depth or weight – could be tethered, to keep it from wandering aimlessly. This little bar, Kino, tucked into a back street, became that place. And it became, too – not exactly by design – a strangely comfortable space. (Kino)That last story, Kino, was the only one that reminded me of early Murakami – the jazz records, the cat, the scotch, the main character who is forced to realise that reality isn't quite what he assumed it to be – and I enjoyed recognising that Kino's bar is the same one that the two characters from the first story (Drive My Car) frequent (which reinforced in my mind that these stories are meant to be seen as linked). After so many stories of men facing the heartbreak of having been left alone, this conclusion from Samsa in Love (a reversal of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which a cockroach finds himself transformed into a human and is disgusted by the experience until he meets a woman and falls for her), seems to serve as a conclusion for the whole thing:
Just thinking about her made him warm inside. No longer did he wish to be a fish or a sunflower – or anything else for that matter. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes and eat with a knife and fork. There are so many things he didn't know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and not a human being, he might never have experienced this emotion. So he felt.And so: While the pain of untethering from a departed woman might be hard to bear for a man, it is better to have loved and lost and all that. Not exactly groundbreaking. And a further note: Not that I want to contribute to any stereotypes of “weird Japan”, but in a collection of stories about Japanese men and women, there's no real insight into their birthrate crisis or declining marriage rates or reports of young people being put off by even the idea of sex (Yesterday has a college-aged character who is uninterested in sex with his girlfriend, but only because they grew up together and it seems “embarrassing” to him). In this book, Murakami seems only to be writing about his own (aging) generation, and while all the wives have affairs (and several men prefer to have noncommittal affairs solely with married women) and none of the main characters have children, he seems to be reporting on the experience of a generation whose time has come and gone; there's a missing weight of relevance.
And yet: I'm a longtime fan of Haruki Murakami, and will continue to read his work for as long as he's writing.
