Men Without Women

My review

This is a collection of tales about men getting older without women. They’re reflecting on gaps, trying to understand what left the void and why they’re feeling it so devastatingly. Instead of characters and plotlines, the stories are driven by curiosity, love, sadness, and hope.

One of the complaints I often see about Haruki Murakami is that he doesn’t know how to write women. I agree. In all the books by him I’ve read, women play a symbolic role. They don’t need individual personalities. Murakami is not an author you read because you want to see fleshed out, real, human women.

Knowing that, I knew what I was getting into when reading Men Without Women. This is about the impact women can have on a man’s life. What the woman character said/did is overshadowed by ideas the male character applies to the gender and the expectations he held for that gender. His reflection on her is wrapped in his concept of what women do for men. (This is true for many, though not all of the stories.) Still, I left each story feeling a tug of grief, like I had just intimately explored the loss a stranger once felt.

One of the stories (I didn’t write down which) said: “sometimes when you lose one women, you lose all women,” and I’ve had a similar thought before. Sometimes when you lose one man, you lose all men. Because you give up. I am a member of Murakami’s lonely hearts club. I know how they feel, I’ve been there before.

Written: 9/17/23

without men

sometimes when you lose one man, you lose all men. because you gave up.

tags: #type/book-rec
title: Men Without Women : Stories
author: [Haruki Murakami]
category: [Fiction]

description: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Including the story "Drive My Car”—now an Academy Award–nominated film—this collection from the internationally acclaimed author "examines what happens to characters without important women in their lives; it'll move you and confuse you and sometimes leave you with more questions than answers" (Barack Obama). Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In Men Without Women Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.

publisher: Vintage
published: 2017-05-09
total pages: 179
isbn: 0451494636 9780451494634

created: 2025-01-07 20:26:35
updated: 2025-01-07 20:26:35