Men Without Women – Murakami

I tried to collect fragments of clues as to her whereabouts, in all sorts of places and from all sorts of people. But these were nothing but scraps, assorted bits and pieces. No matter how many you collect, fragments are still just that. Her essence always vanished like a mirage. And from land, the horizon was infinite As was the horizon at sea. I busily chased it, moving from point to point-from Bombay to Cape Town to Reykjavik to the Bahamas. I made the rounds of every town with a harbor, but by the time I arrived, she was already gone. Only a faint trace of her warmth remained on an unmade bed.

Oh Murakami, how do you do it? You’re like a drug. I love reading the simple, elegant prose that makes everyday actions seem so much more than they are, part of a fascinating narrative. Yet you also make the most bizarre, sometimes absurd situations seem absolutely normal. I the more I strive to understand, the less I actually do. And the less I understand, the more I read to understand, and so it goes on. I mean, it works a treat, I’ll give you that.

Seven short stories ranging from the bizarre to the unreal, about men without women, or men and women, or maybe just about men. It’s Murakami, it literally could be anything. Obviously there’s a jazz bar, a jazz bar owner even. There’s an actor, a house bound patient and a cosmetic surgeon amongst the seven men. They retell or recall stories of the women that have impacted their lives, in that Murakami way where it’s not quite normal, but not quite abnormal.

Of course, some of it resonated with me, with my own life and my previous relationships, some of it was completely alien, oftentimes the two occurred in the same short story, and taken simply, is how men see women and how they rub and bounce along off of each other throughout life. I wouldn’t pick out one story over and above the others, and I think that the collection works as a whole, although, in all honesty, I couldn’t tell you why, it just does.

So if you want Murakami with the smallest pinch of romance, with his usual dollop of weird and just the right amount of normal, then read Men Without Women.

This is what he told me. “I’ve been out with lots of women who are much prettier than her, better built, with better taste, and more intelligent. But those comparisons are meaningless. Because to me she is someone special. A ‘complete presence,’ I guess you could call it. All of her qualities are tightly bound into one core. You can’t separate each individual quality to measure and analyze it, to say it’s better or worse than the same quality in someone else. It’s what’s in her core that attracts me so strongly. Like a powerful magnet. It’s beyond logic.”