Without Women: Haruki Murakami

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.
Kafuko, a middle-aged character actor, used to be married. Throughout their life
together, his wife had affairs, but he loved her, and though it was painful – “his heart
was torn and his insides were bleeding” – he never dared ask her what deficiency she
was tryng to make up for in their relationship; now it’s too late. In another story, jazz fan
Kino blunders in on his wife having sex with his best friend and, apparently more
embarrassed than wounded, decides to begin life again as a bar owner in another part of
town. He equips the perfect establishment, then sits in it playing his favourite albums
and waiting for his first customer, a policy guaranteed to draw in spirits as unquietly
defeated as himself.
By the end of the title story, its narrator has concluded, in appropriately
Hemingwayesque fashion, that when you lose one woman, you lose them all: you
become, somehow, the representative of the category “men without women”, alone but
not singular. To be trapped by that “relentlessly rigid plural” is to live at the heart of
loneliness. But something about this rhetorical sleight of hand reveals loneliness as a
coping strategy in itself. Kafuko the actor, for instance, performs his way into his
exchanges with others, taking on the qualities of the person he needs to be in the
situation he’s in – but he learned the technique in childhood, long before he got into the
profession, long before his wife died. “Why don’t you have any friends?” his new driver
asks him one day, in a traffic jam on the Tokyo metropolitan expressway. It’s an
interesting question.
These men can’t pinpoint the moment their lives went wrong. They barely remember their
previous state
There’s a dialled-down quality to these men. Their exchanges with other people are
limited to bedrooms and bars. They have one eccentricity each: they care about reading
or cooking or the history of popular music. Murakami Man, we begin to see, has no
friends because, in the pursuit of convenience and emotional self-protection, in proofing
himself against grief, he chose distance. He chose loneliness long before he experienced
loss. As a result, he is unable to take advantage of the predictable life he has been at such
pains to organise. If he fails to connect with others, he fails, equally, to connect with
himself.
Devotees will find plenty of signature Murakami here, in the empty, almost Lynchian
interiors of “Kino”, the weird psychic landscape of the narrator of “Men Without
Women”, the troubled Prague of “Samsa in Love”. You’re never quite sure about the
story’s boundaries – sometimes you aren’t even sure it’s begun. Murakami never tells it
until he’s ready, and that may take pages of careful preparation. He’s as fascinated as his
specimens by the complex layers of social geology in which they’re to be found
embedded, so that’s where he begins. It’s up to the reader to work out why.
In “Yesterday”, Tanimura, who is from Kansai, divests himself so completely from the
Kansai dialect that no one in Tokyo can believe he comes from there; while his friend
Kitaru, in the attempt to become a serious supporter of the Hanshin Tigers baseball
team, submerges himself in the Kansai dialect to the point where he seems to have been
born there. Meanwhile, the narrator of “An Independent Organ” is teasing us: “I’m sure
you’ll understand that the veracity of each tiny detail really isn’t critical.” All that
matters, surely, is that “a clear portrait should emerge”.
The authorial voice is as subtle as the tease, unassumingly ironic enough to avoid the
banality it explores: it calmly reveals the passive self-repression or puncturable egotism
of the men. Murakami’s women are a different matter. Their capacities seem to fall
halfway between motherly and male: they are gruff caregivers. Misaki the chauffeur in
“Drive My Car” speaks bluntly, wears a man’s herringbone jacket and drives with “a
minimum of wasted effort”. In “Scheherazade”, the eponymous storyteller is “a
housewife from a provincial city”: her businesslike sexual manners remind the hero that
she’s a trained nurse.
Tale by tale, the different women – unassuaged, and who can blame them – move off to
the peripheries. The men apologise for themselves and are content to drift, remaining
puzzled as much by their own behaviour as anyone else’s. Their stories are never less
than readable, comic, amiably fantastic, human, yet with an entertainingly sarcastic
edge, but verge on the bland. Unlike Hemingway’s Italian soldier, they can’t pinpoint the
moment their lives went wrong; they barely remember their previous condition – and
not well enough to describe it. Have they learned anything from experience? They say
so. We’re left wondering if that’s true, or if, like Kino the barman, they’re really courting
self-erasure.

Without Women: Haruki Murakami

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Without Women: Haruki Murakami

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Without Women: Haruki Murakami

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

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

You might also like