This is a collection of tales about men getting older without women. They’re reflecting on gaps, trying to understand what left the void and why they’re feeling it so devastatingly. Instead of characters and plotlines, the stories are driven by curiosity, love, sadness, and hope.
One of the complaints I often see about Haruki Murakami is that he doesn’t know how to write women. I agree. In all the books by him I’ve read, women play a symbolic role. They don’t need individual personalities. Murakami is not an author you read because you want to see fleshed out, real, human women.
Knowing that, I knew what I was getting into when reading Men Without Women. This is about the impact women can have on a man’s life. What the woman character said/did is overshadowed by ideas the male character applies to the gender and the expectations he held for that gender. His reflection on her is wrapped in his concept of what women do for men. (This is true for many, though not all of the stories.) Still, I left each story feeling a tug of grief, like I had just intimately explored the loss a stranger once felt.
One of the stories (I didn’t write down which) said: “sometimes when you lose one women, you lose all women,” and I’ve had a similar thought before. Sometimes when you lose one man, you lose all men. Because you give up. I am a member of Murakami’s lonely hearts club. I know how they feel, I’ve been there before.