Murakami's shorts: Men without women

Men without women

By Haruki Murakami

Fiction, 228 pages

Just a little after valentine's day, I met up with my friends but opened this book to pass the time as I was in the last two short stories out of the eight. When my friends saw the title, they surmised that it might be about misogyny. No, I said they're short stories. Actually, I was in the seventh kafka-esque story of Samsa In Love and I was deciding if I still liked the book itself.

I liked how it started with a woman driver and flowed till the fifth story of Kino which I was a bit lost (need to reread this one to get to where it's headed but perhaps that's the point, being lost). Actually, this is the first nonfiction of Murakami that I finished, the first attempt was The Wind Up Bird Chronicle which I find too difficult to continue. I loved Murakami's memoir "What I talk about when I talk about running" that I decided to read his nonfiction. In this shorts, he is still philosophical as his memoir and has wild characters full of enigma in thoughts & deeds. 

He has humor coupled with acute observation. His characters transported me in most unlikely places where men missed their women (or their imagined women). 

From lost Kino, the collection brought me to Samsa. I was about to step back from liking the collection until I highlighted this part:

"It's strange, isn't it?" the woman said in a pensive voice. "Everything is blowing up around us, but there are still those who care about a broken lock, and others who are dutiful enough to try to fix it ... But maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart."

Isn't that splendid a paragraph? Perhaps it just captured my feelings, living through this feeling when my country is currently and endlessly mired with corruption and I am still here, a public defender for 21 years standing like a loyal soldier defending in the name and strength of democracy and suffering for its weakness.

And just like that, I'm back to advocating this collection of short stories. The last story sealed everything with a bonus. I was treated with a dessert that is jazz.

This book can be as delectable as any elevator music. The wisdom and ruminations can surely be here and there in the background as we rise up to the top floors where love and life could be extraordinary or just different. 

This is strangely a total romantic letter written for men who lost their women.  No signs of misogyny, I promise.

"In any case, that's how you become Men Without Women. Before you even know it. And once you''ve become Men Without Women, loneliness seeps deep

down inside your body, like a red-wine stain on a pastel carpet. No matter how many home ec books you study gettıng rid of that stain isn't easy. The stain might fade a bit over time, but it will still remain, as a stain, until the day you draw your final breath. It has the right to be a stain, the right to make the occasional, public, stain-like pronouncement. And you are left to live the rest of your life with the gradual spread of that color, with that ambiguous outline."