Book Review: Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Name of the book: Men Without Women
Name of the author: Haruki Murakami
Length of the book: 228 pages
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I’d been long waiting to take up Haruki Murakami and a month ago to my surprise, I got a mail that his latest work was up for reviewing opportunities. You see all these people around; so madly in love with the writer, you want to give it a shot at least once. So many readers crushing so hard, posting photographs of those beautiful covers on Instagram, I knew had to say yes for his latest work - Men Without Women.

In his latest; like the title suggests, Murakami deals with men who are coping with their loneliness and fighting answers to questions they often ask themselves. Some run away from them, and some push it away, only because they’re scared to know the answers.

In the seven short stories across the book, Murakami narrates tales about different men, emotionally stuck in their relationships with women in their lives. These characters lost in their own world are sometimes a doctor, an actor, a student etc. Each of them has a life filled with agony that he doesn’t know what to do with, or how to tackle it. While they address their failures, almost all of them end up even more traumatized or anguished. However, the story titled ‘Samsa in Love’ stands out compared to the rest, as a delightful take on Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. It is probably the only narrative, where Murakami forfeits to a compulsive hope for new beginnings.

As a first by Murakami, this might not be the ideal choice if realism is not your cup of tea. Since the stories can get extremely disturbing or sensitive for a reader, subjective to taste and preference. Giving it three and a half out of five I personally enjoyed the shorts, since the writer beautifully crafts stories and develops characters (only a few) simultaneously, without the reader even noticing it. Especially with the constraint of length, these stories turn out to be spectacular conversations that a reader finds himself lost in, trying to join the dots of ambiguity towards the end of each short.

This one particular quote from the collection really touched a nerve and has to be one of my favourite descriptions from Men Without Women,

You are a pastel-colored Persian carpet, and loneliness is a Bordeaux wine stain that won’t come out

Special thanks to Flipkart for sending over this hardbound copy of Men Without Women that boasts a beautifully designed cover.