Men Without Women

By Haruki Murakami (m.)

Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

(2014, translated 2017)

Vintage

(Short Story Collection)

Murakami’s subject matter is loneliness and the unattached middle-aged adult male. Men without Women is a collection of seven short stories, including “Drive My Car,” “An Independent Organ,” “Scheherazade,” “Samsa in Love,” and the eponymous “Men Without Women.” The topic of lonely single and divorced Japanese men is not insignificant, as Wikipedia reports that in Japan “Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of 50-year-old people who had never married roughly quadrupled for men to 20.1% and doubled for women to 10.6%.[45][46] The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare predicts these numbers to rise to 29% of men and 19.2% of women by 2035.[47]” Murakami’s men live in surreal settings outside of normal time and space. Relationships, if they occur, are rendered with cold and empty eroticism. As shocking as they are, Murakami’s stories are not without humor. For example, in “Samsa in Love,” Murakami flips Kafka’s Metamorphosis on its head, with Gregor Samsa waking up in human form with absolutely no memory of what it is to be a man. Naked and disoriented, Samsa struggles with the awkward body he inhabits. He encounters a helpful, unflappable cleaning woman who explains to him some of the expectations society will have of Samsa as a man. In passing, she points out that before entering the world he should conceal his erection, which causes Samsa to see his penis as another disruptive, alien, and unknowable development; the story ends with the hero about to enter society as an outsider in a body he does not understand.

“Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world? Why hadn’t he been turned into a fish? Or a sunflower? A fish or a sunflower made sense. More sense, anyway, than this human being, Gregor Samsa.” (“Samsa in Love”)