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Murakami's Men Without Women: Rolling Again | Israel today

2021-12-29T14:03:41.681Z


The protagonists of the great Japanese writer's short stories were abandoned, betrayed, lost the love of their lives or did not achieve it at all.


The Japanese rock writer Murakami became famous for his fantastic realism, a special combination of reality and imagination that is reflected in all his important novels - "Norwegian Forest", "Mechanical Bird Beam", "Kafka on the Beach", "1Q84 and" Killing Commandura ".

Between one novel and the next he devotes himself to writing a slightly different kind and creates stories - some short and some real novelties - which carry all the familiar "trademarks" of his world (from the rain that can not disappear to his favorite jazz music), but packed in Japanese frugality in an abbreviated cover .

Murakami himself called the situation between the novels "intermezzo", and the miniatures he concocted and bound in the current collection of stories fit perfectly with this musical term: free-style short works, a kind of fleeting appetizer, satisfying and doubtfully stimulating, before the heavy and long meals came. Before "Men Without Women" Murakami had already published other collections of stories ("The Elephant Gone", "Tokyo Legends" and more), and this year another collection of stories was published in his pen, "Single First Person" (not yet translated into English), and the regular action pattern seems to be - A novel, stories and again a novel - has become another of his hallmarks.

When the Japanese genius gave the collection of stories dealing with the lives of men who find themselves alone the name "Men without Women," he must have wanted to mention Ernest Hemingway's collection of stories of the same name. However, it is difficult to think of a greater distance than that which separates the men of the two writers. Hemingway's characters are fearless and courageous heroes who control fate and defeat it; Murakami's characters tend to surrender, or in his words reduce themselves, to the point that their existence is questionable. "After all he had achieved nothing in his life, he was clearly unproductive," the writer describes one of his protagonists, "he could not bring happiness to anyone, and of course not to himself. Happiness? He was not even sure of the meaning of the word."

These men became "men without women" because they were abandoned, betrayed and lost, lost the love of their lives or did not achieve it at all and simply gave up. Since then they have been doomed to the existence of loneliness from which there is no way out or refuge, because according to Murakami, "loneliness seeps into the body like a stain of red wine on a light carpet." They will seek out other men's company, invest their grief in whiskey in dark bars, share their story in a casual conversation, listen with a veiled look to "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" performed by Coleman Hawkins, and ... be left alone.


The loneliness of men grows in Murakami a thousand flowers, and does not need a particularly sharp eye to discover among them familiar inflorescences. A huge insect that wakes up in the morning and discovers that he has become a person from the "Samsa in Love" story is of course the reversal of Franz Kafka's "incarnation" plot. The passions of Gregor the new SMSa are different from those instilled by Kafka to the original SMSa, and yet the loneliness connects them, whatever the absurdity and metamorphosis may be.

Adoration of Kafka runs like the second thread in all of Murakami's work, and if he decides to win the protagonist of the story "Drive in my car" by the meaningful name Kapuku, the reader will not be able to escape the symbolism involved.

Like Kafka, Murakami is interested in psychological issues, and each of his male characters is a psychological riddle that invites decipherment.

But the decipherment will never be completed, and from the Kafkaesque mood that takes over his protagonists' experiences there is nowhere to run.

Seemingly, the stories of "Men Without Women" are universal and devoid of local identification, although the plot is always planted in Japan.

Even the metaphorical language used by Murakami and his favorite images have been borrowed from cultural traditions far removed from the land of the rising sun.

"Straight-tongued salt seduced her with smooth words to board his great ship and carried her away, that's all," one of the protagonists describes the parting of his life and likens his bitter fate to cruises, naval storms and abductions, seemingly taken from the cornerstones of Western culture.

But with Ngard, and not a little, the foreign cover, Murakami's other face is revealed, the face we have always covered with his Western readers. From the reality of his stories will emerge the Japanese mystery. A customer who buys from the bar in Tokyo will merge with the branches of the willow tree and be reborn as an angel guarding the owners of the place, to imply that life, as it seems at first glance, is but one of many reflections, and who knows what is the right reflection, what is the desired reflection.

Whatever reflection we prefer, the atmosphere of "men without women" will remain melancholy.

The clouds of sadness hovering over these men will not dissipate, and the sky will always yield more and more drops of rain.

"I wish there was a machine that could accurately measure nerve and display it in documentable numbers," one of them would remark a typical Japanese remark, adding immediately an equally typical Japanese remark: "And it would be wonderful if this machine were the size you could carry in the palm of your hand."

Murakami does not invent machines or make measurements, but he distributes his sweet sadness to his readers full of handfuls, and most of them just ask for extra. 

Rocky Murakami / Men Without Women;


(English: Shaul Levin), Kinneret Zmora, 221 pages

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Source: israelhayom

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