Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami / Review by Kate Kellaway

Haruki Murakami

Review

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami – review

Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited return to the short story is a masterclass in pacing and the tragicomic revelation

Kate Kellaway

Sunday 14 May 2017

C

uriosity, in Murakami’s supremely enjoyable, philosophical and pitch-perfect new collection of short stories – his first for more than a decade – is what motivates many of his characters. Their curiosity becomes ours and propels each narrative onwards. But curiosity is shown to be complicated. Is it healthy, necessary, wise? Or does it kill the cat? In the first story, Drive My Car (Murakami’s Beatlemania has outlasted the success of his bestselling novel Norwegian Wood), curiosity is in every sense a driving force. A veteran actor and widower is obliged to hire a chauffeur for his ancient yellow Saab 900 convertible (Murakami always supplies manufacturing details of his characters’ cars). Kafuku has been banned from driving after a scrape in which he was found to have been drinking, and his theatre company is now paying for his transport during a run of Uncle Vanya. He is compelled therefore to put himself in the competent hands of a plain chauffeur, a woman with ears “like satellite dishes placed in some remote landscape” (the glee with which Murakami alights on such similes is infectious). 

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, book review / The unassuming quietness of these stories

 

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, book review: The unassuming quietness of these stories doesn’t mean they don’t hit home with when they need to

A new collection of short stories by Murakami explore the lives of men who find themselves alone 

Lucy Scholes

Wednesday 17 May 2017 16:21 BST

I have something of a love/hate relationship with short stories. Too many mediocre offerings leave me despairing of the genre, but then a collection like Men Without Women comes along and all is forgiven, my faith restored in the recognition of how utterly perfect the medium can be – in the right hands.

 

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami review – a quiet panic

There are shades of Hemingway in these stories about men who choose loneliness in the avoidance of pain

M John Harrison

Friday 5 May 2017

A

quiet panic afflicts the male characters in Hemingway’s 1927 collection Men Without Women, that touchstone in the development of both Hemingwayism and the short story. Men should never put themselves in the position where they can lose someone, a bereaved Italian soldier warns Hemingway’s long-running protagonist Nick Adams: instead, a man “should find things he cannot lose”. Ninety years later, Haruki Murakami’s men without women have come to the same conclusion, polishing it into a postmodern lifestyle.

 

Review: 'Men Without Women' by Haruki Murakami

By Shoshana Olidort

Chicago Tribune

•May 08, 2017 at 1:06 pm

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 will never have her in the first place.

Scheherazade By Haruki Murakami

 

Scheherazade

By Haruki Murakami

Translated, from the Japanese, by Ted Goossen.

October 6, 2014

Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights.” Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the next morning. (She never stayed with him till morning, anyway.) She told Habara the stories because she wanted to, because, he guessed, she enjoyed curling up in bed and talking to a man during those languid, intimate moments after making love. And also, probably, because she wished to comfort Habara, who had to spend every day cooped up indoors.