Men Without Women: Stories

A man adapts to his new female chauffeur, while another is recruited to date his coworker’s girlfriend. A playboy falls in love, then wastes away. One man opens a bar, while another is trapped indoors, and still another is recently transformed back into Gregor Samsa.

All seven stories in this collection explore the different relationships shared by men and women, as well as what becomes of those men in the absence of those women.

It’s hard to explain what’s going on with this collection without spoiling the reading experience. Needless to say, Men Without Women is one of Murakami’s most ambitious, most peculiar works yet. Steeped in wonderful melancholy, we are treated to a half-dozen stories (some of them secondhand, revealing little of the narrators) that all center on the unexpected connections we form with members of the opposite sex.

One of the stories is unpleasantly misogynistic in its tone, but I suspect it was intentionally so to give us more insight into the narrator and color our views of him. Still, it was a off-putting moment in an otherwise thoughtful collection that had me pondering the many questions Murakami raises here.