207. Men Without Women

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Author:   Haruki Murakami

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Foreign

240 pages, published May 9, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Men Without Women is a collection of short stories from Japanese author Haruki Murakami.  All of the stories take place in Japan and, as the title instructs, all have a theme of men without women.

 

Quotes 

“Once you’ve become Men Without Women loneliness seeps deep down inside your body, like a red-wine stain on a pastel carpet.”

 

“Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.”

 

“There were two types of drinkers:  those who drank to enhance their personalities, and those who sought to take something away.”

 

“Here’s what hurts the most,” Kafuku said. “I didn’t truly understand her–or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she’s dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot.”  Tatsuki thought for a moment before speaking.  “But Mr. Kafuku, can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?”

 

“But he doubted the dead could think or feel anything. In his opinion, that was ones of the great things about dying.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed a few of the stories in Men Without Women, overall the book did not do it for me.  It was a bit of a slog to finish it (never a good sign), especially as the quality level of the stories declined precipitously towards the end of the book.  More than once, I wondered what point the author was trying to make.  This will probably be my only experience with Haruki Murakami.