Men Without Women: Stories
Men Without Women gathers seven stories bound by a single, aching preoccupation: what happens to men when the women in their lives slip away, through betrayal, disappearance, or death. Written in Murakami's later, quieter register, the collection moves between plain realism and the sudden strangeness his readers know well.
A widowed stage actor lets a young woman drive him through Tokyo while he circles the truth about his late wife. A lonely man opens a small bar and finds that solitude has a way of inviting the uncanny. A modern retelling casts Gregor Samsa waking as a man rather than an insect, learning tenderness for the first time. Across the seven pieces, ordinary lives brush against the inexplicable, and heartbreak becomes a lens on desire, memory, and the peculiar architecture of loneliness.
Spare, wry, and often melancholy, Men Without Women shows Murakami working in miniature, distilling the themes of his novels into stories that linger long after the last page. The title nods to Ernest Hemingway's collection of the same name, but the sensibility is unmistakably Murakami's own.
A widowed stage actor in the story Drive My Car who hires a young woman to be his chauffeur and reckons with his late wife's affairs.
A man who leaves his job after discovering his wife's infidelity and opens a quiet bar, in the story Kino.
In Samsa in Love, a being who wakes as a man in occupied Prague and learns human feeling for the first time.
A confirmed bachelor and cosmetic surgeon undone by love in An Independent Organ.
An eccentric young man who speaks in a borrowed Kansai dialect in the story Yesterday.