Men Without Women - Haruki Murakami

  "take me back in time
maybe I can forget
turn a different corner
and we never would've met
Would you care ?
Oh, I don't understand it for you it's a breeze
Little by little, you've brought me to my knees
Don't you care?"
( "A Different Corner" - George Michael )


I took to reading this book, as a side reading project, since a non-fiction I was reading in parallel didn't offer aesthetic respite, however much good a book it was. Once begun, it took very little time to realise that it was going to be a book that will be savoured, and possibly a hard copy sought for ( the only hard copy I found so far was a hard cover one, which I didn't care for). These are stories to be read, savoured for the nuances, reflected and cherished. The only Murakami book I've read prior was "Kafka on the shore", and while that was an enjoyable read, this I have to admit I enjoyed much more.  I will dwell instead on how this books works as a whole.

While "Men without Women" is the title of the last short story, it serves as the main theme for the whole collection quite aptly. There is loss here - loss of women - loss of women to other men, or deceived by women. Or death has taken them away; or at minimum, a woman gives meaning to a man in solitude and he looks forward to her periodic visits ( Scheherazade ) It is about the vacuum a woman, usually special to that man. The beauty in these stories are, that most of these men aren't even tied to a single woman. Yet, they miss that one woman more than others. And it isn't necessarily that the women are breathtakingly beautiful - for they are not in certain instances. At another level these stories can be read as taking back the reader to his or her private experiences and drawn parallels therein. Hence these are at a level, stories that could be looked upon as accounts of intimacy.
  I will quote a part from the last short story to nurture my reading of the book as that of one broad topic - or one mental state broadly, which is a more appropriate way to portray the book, holistically.
“Suddenly one day you become Men Without Women. That day comes to you completely out of the blue, without the faintest of warnings or hints beforehand. No premonitions or foreboding, no knocks or clearing of throats. Turn a corner and you know you’re already there. But by then there’s no going back. Once you round that bend, that is the only world you can possibly inhabit. In that world you are called ‘Men Without Women.’"

And last, what has it in common with Hemingway's book of the same title ? Probably, just that. I read a few of the short stories of that collection to see if there are any parallels to be drawn, and I could draw none. ( Hemingway's short stories are being read, as separate reading project )