Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women — a review.
As long as there have been men, women, and the written word, there have always been stories of men without women. From Odysseus pining after his wife while on his journey, to the Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 collection Men Without Women, these kinds of stories form the bedrock of world literature.
In naming his collection after Hemingway’s work, it could be argued that Murakami is parking his tanks on the American master’s lawn, but in his own understated way. Indeed, he has spent a large period of his literary career drilling down into the psyche of quiet, unassuming young men navigating through life in modern Japan. Men Without Women’s title alone evokes Komura, the hi-fi salesman whose wife disappears in ‘UFO in Kushiro’, the first story from 2001’s after the quake, one of the few story collections he has published.
On the surface, these stories don’t stray far from this Murakami oeuvre, for better and for worse. Take ‘Yesterday’ as an example. Tanimura, an archetypal Murakami protagonist, looks back on his college days and his eccentric friend Kitaru. The start of the story, a callback to the eponymous Beatles song, is near identical to the beginning of Norwegian Wood, and almost reads like a hackneyed homage to his groundbreaking 1987 novel rather than a piece of fresh writing.
The story itself unfolds into a measured meditation on being a bystander and living vicariously — in this case, the straight-laced Tanimura lives through Kitaru and his various eccentricities, being told “You’re a good guy, though sometimes a little too normal, you know”. Communicating, in blunt terms, the crushing banality of Murakami’s signature protagonists’ lives.
If ‘Yesterday’ leans on the musical memory of Norwegian Wood, then the next story, ‘An Independent Organ’, communicates the more visceral side of Murakami’s writing. Dr Tokai is a plastic surgeon, who the narrator claims lives a life that is “surprisingly artificial”. Such is Murakami’s skill, this does not veer off a cliff into a clichéd Pygmalionesque narrative, instead echoing Han Kang’s Booker Prize winner The Vegetarian in its visceral depiction of the Doctor’s descent into reclusiveness.
The key theme Murakami communicates in Men Without Women is one of transformation: how people change to fit in, in Kitaru’s case (he learns the local dialect of his favourite baseball team in order to fit in with their supporters) and how Doctor Tokai’s life is changed once he finally falls in love with one person.
But these are muted transformations, never understood by the narrator, adding to the emotional murk that shrouds the unlucky men without women. The characters walk through a world that is so bewildering in its emotional landscape that oftentimes they don’t realise that they are unhappy, or their mood expresses itself in odd ways.
The housebound Habara, in ‘Scheheradze’, represents the apex of this passivity. He relies on his support worker, who he names after the beautiful queen in One Thousand and One Nights, for his emotional and sexual needs. Their hallucinogenic talk drifts from lampreys to a teenage act of bizarre obsession.
These are stories of sitting alone, of drinking alone, of midnight thoughts and strange occurrences in quiet neighbourhood bars. They have a mesmeric, gentle intensity, like tuned-down talk radio — and all but two are largely the same.
These two outliers are stories that elevate this collection from standard Murakami fare to something vital. The claustrophobic ‘Samsa In Love’, is ostensibly a sequel to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, that sees Gregor Samsa wake up as a human again and have to agonisingly learn to function in a dissociative Prague with “soldiers on the streets”. Claustrophobic, almost Beckettian in nature, it is a jolting and riveting read, full of pustulating bodily detail, far removed from the other, more archetypal Murakami stories in the collection.
The final story, ‘Men without Women’, has a deeply disturbed, ranting narrative voice, a darkened version of the unassuming, quiet Murakami protagonist — If the other six stories are a record spinning smoothly on a turntable, this is the record scratch. The unreliable narrator speaks of an ex-lover who had committed suicide, in between observations about “crafty sailors” that lured her away from him. It plugs into the very modern debate surrounding toxic masculinity and male jealousy, proving that Murakami still has the insight to contribute to contemporary issues, even after over thirty years writing mainstream literary fiction for audiences around the world.
The true glory of his work, though, is how multifaceted it is. No reader could accuse any of these stories of being two-dimensional. Each tale is swimming with detail that will resonate differently with different readers — be it the cat wandering into a jazz themed neighbourhood bar, or the brusque, skeletal retellings of teenage relationships lost to the sands of time.
Murakami is still on form, still pumping out stories that echo his most seminal works, while pushing the boundaries ever so slightly, like a jazz improvisation on a classic tune.
