Thoughts on Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
I read Men Without Women the way you wander through an aquarium alone.
You move slowly, you stop longer than you mean to,seeing the distance there, knowing you can’t cross it.
That’s what this book felt like to me…not a story I could retell cleanly.
In this book Murakami wrote seven short stories, each about a man who are either physically or emotionally stranded.
Compared to his other novels I noticed this was a more quiet and softer side to Murakami. Less plot, more atmosphere.
It didn’t give me scenes I could fully grab onto… it gave me moods. Hes very been the type to describe screens in much detail, adding most detail what the female protagonists are wearing, but this book emphasized more emotional impressions than his others. The kind that don’t register all at once, but creep up on you later while you’re walking home.
It reminded me that not everything meaningful arrives loudly but some things just linger.
“Here’s what hurts the most,” Kafuku said. “I didn’t truly understand her—or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she’s dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot.”
I say linger because after finishing this book, the men are fighting in their mind about how much they love the woman they're describing or if they care to lose the woman at all, but at the end of every short story it was not the loss that hurt them the most, but more the realization that they never fully knew the person they loved.
If you’ve been reading him for years, it can feel like you’re meeting the same man over and over again. Quiet, detached, emotionally stalled, drifting through life with a drink in his hand and a woman just out of reach type. Continuous loneliness recycled. The repetition gets lazy.
There are moments in Men Without Women where the men feel passive to the point where love turned to frustration but yet they don’t always fight hard enough. They don’t always show up fully for the people (women) around them. Anyone can notice that Marakami places great distance between men and women, typically in the bad way.
I can see how coming exhausted by Murakami’s archetypes, these stories might feel empty rather than quiet. Like loneliness being aestheticized instead of interrogated. Emotional withdrawal being mistaken for depth.
Its safe to say I do really love Murakami. And because of that, I read these stories less as repetitions and more as variations, small shifts in tone, regret, and self-awareness. I dont reach for him to give me a redemption arc. It is more for a story about stillness… watching people sit inside the consequences of their emotional blind spots.
These men aren’t admirable, but they’re familiar in a way that’s hard to look away from.
Men Without Women didn’t captivate me because it surprised me, it did so because it lingered. It trusted its silence and didn’t rush extreme clarity or an unnecessary repetitive backstory into its characters.
I won’t argue that this is Murakami at his boldest but its definetly at his quietest.
