Men Without Women

Seven stories, each about a man in the condition the title names: without a woman, or becoming without, or discovering he already is. The women have left — through death, through departure, through the gradual withdrawal of attention that amounts to the same thing. What remains is the shape of absence: men whose lives are organised around a loss they can name but not explain.

In ‘Drive My Car’, an actor who has lost his wife to infidelity hires a young woman to drive him in the battered yellow Saab he can no longer drive himself. In ‘Yesterday’, a man is asked by his friend to pursue the friend’s girlfriend — the emotional logic of which takes years to become clear. In ‘Scheherazade’, a woman who visits a man in his enforced isolation tells him a story every time, each one a kind of survival mechanism.

Men Without Women is the most emotionally concentrated of Murakami’s story collections — the one that most directly examines the emotional world of his male narrators, without the magical apparatus his novels often require. It is also his most Hemingway-inflected: the title is from Hemingway’s 1927 collection, and the stripped directness is a tribute to that inheritance.

Reading Guides

• Books About Japan

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Men Without Women apart: The thematic unity gives the collection unusual coherence; ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Scheherazade’ are among his finest recent stories; and More emotionally direct than his earlier story collections. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Men Without Women give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Loss as the structuring condition of masculine life in Murakami. The woman’s absence as more present than her presence. The most mature and restrained of his story collections. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Haruki Murakami’s prose in Men Without Women is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Seven stories feels slim as a collection. Some stories feel like minor variations on the same situation. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Murakami fans; readers who prefer short fiction

The Collection and Its Title

Men Without Women was published in Japan in 2014 and translated into English by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen in 2017. The collection contains seven stories, all dealing in some way with men who have lost women — to death, departure, rejection, or the simple erosion of intimacy. The title is taken directly from Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 story collection Men Without Women, a deliberate homage that signals Murakami’s ongoing engagement with the American literary tradition that shaped his early work.

”Drive My Car” and the Hamaguchi Adaptation

The opening story, “Drive My Car,” became internationally known through Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film adaptation, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and several other major prizes. Hamaguchi’s film expands the story significantly — the original is under forty pages — weaving in elements from two other stories in the collection (“Scheherazade” and “Kino”) to create a three-hour meditation on grief, performance, and the stories people tell to survive their losses. The film brought significant new attention to the collection and to Murakami’s short fiction more broadly. The adaptation is notable for being faithful to the spirit of Murakami’s work while being radically free with its specific material.

The Seven Stories in Brief

The collection’s seven stories vary in length and mode. “Drive My Car” opens the book with a forty-page story that is among the most fully developed. “Yesterday” turns on a peculiarity of Japanese dialect — a Tokyo man who speaks in Kansai dialect, which he has adopted as a kind of performance of ordinariness — and on the strangest possible friendship triangle. “An Independent Organ” is told by a doctor who falls catastrophically in love for the first time in middle age and is destroyed by it; the story is the one most reliant on summary rather than scene, and it demonstrates that Murakami can write loss through telling as well as through showing. “Scheherazade” gives us a woman who comes to a man in isolation and tells him a story every visit, each one a fragment of autobiography, each one a survival mechanism. “Kino” follows a man who opens a bar after his marriage ends and finds that something is wrong with the bar — perhaps with him. “Samsa in Love” imagines Kafka’s Gregor Samsa having transformed back into a human and attempting to navigate the ordinary world. And the title story, “Men Without Women,” is the shortest: a meditation on receiving the news of a woman’s death from a husband you barely knew, and on what it means to be in the condition the collection names.

What “Men Without Women” Means

The collection is not simply about men who have been left. It is about a particular relationship to absence — the way absence structures a life more definitively than presence often does, the way a woman who has gone continues to organise the man she left behind. Murakami is precise about the mechanism: these men are not unhappy in the simple sense, not destroyed or paralyzed. They function. They work, they drink, they think. But the woman is gone, and the shape of her absence is the shape of their lives.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Seven stories about loss, desire, and the specific absence that women leave in men’s lives — Murakami at his most emotionally concentrated and least reliant on magical machinery.