Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami Review

Haruki Murakami’s latest short story collection is also my least favourite of his so far. Out of the seven fairly longish stories, only one of them was half-decent while the others ranged from bleh to agonisingly dull.

Kino is the ok story where a recently heartbroken man opens up a bar and plays host to a strange man who comes in every week, reads a book and drinks his booze. Its focus meanders quite a bit from Kino to the stranger to some random woman and then back to the stranger, though it’s never boring, and I liked the hint of magical realism dancing on the edges of the tale. However I would’ve preferred a less self-consciously literary, vague ending which left me unsatisfied and wondering what the hey I’d just read.

And self-consciously literary, vague, unsatisfying and what the hey basically sums up the rest of the stories! In Drive My Car, an actor gets a female driver to drive him to and from the theatre, along the way telling her about his dead philandering wife and the friendship he struck up with one of her lovers. Yesterday is about a man who goes out with his friend’s girlfriend who dreams of an icy moon. Scheherazade is about a man seemingly held prisoner in a house visited by a woman he calls Scheherazade (though it’s not her real name) who tells him about her odd dreams after they sex. A wealthy plastic surgeon starves himself to death after falling in love in An Independent Organ.

Uh… huh? I guess the theme is weird relationships but I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about it - Murakami’s women is cheating ho-bags? The stories feel like they’re trying to seem deep and profound but they come across as really shallow and pointless. I get the literary references - 1001 Arabian Nights (Scheherazade), Kafka (Samsa in Love), Hemingway (Men Without Women), and of course the near-obligatory Beatles nods (Drive My Car, Yesterday) - but so what? I have read Hemingway’s collection, also called Men Without Women, though it’s been years and I can’t remember it so I’m not sure if it ties into this in any meaningful way.

The worst stories were Samsa in Love and Men Without Women. A man wakes up to discover he’s Gregor Samsa - haaaah, geddit?? Like an inversion of Kafka’s Metamorphosis when Gregor Samsa woke up to discover he was a giant bug! Gregor Samsa falls in love with a hunchback locksmith and… that’s it. I guess it was all about that opening line. In Men Without Women some guy rambles on about a woman he used to love who’s just died. Awful, boring rubbish.

Kino was ok and the writing in general is of a high standard, and I liked certain elements of some of the stories like the odd, ambiguous scenario of Scheherazade - why is that man trapped in a house and can’t leave? On the whole though this is a very weak collection with a series of instantly forgettable crap. I’d recommend either after the quake or The Elephant Vanishes over this fans-only book.