Men Without Women: Murakami's Stories About Lonely Fellas

May is unquestionably the best month for new collections of short stories in recent memory. Last week, Richard Russo published Trajectory, which is awesome, and this week, Haruki Murakami, published a new collection titled Men Without Women.

(As well, Joshua Ferris — he of Then We Came to the End and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour fame — also published a collection titled The Dinner Party, which I haven't read yet, but will very soon.)

Murakami's new collection includes seven stories tied together by the common theme of lonely dudes with unusual relationships with women. Several of these stories are delightfully mundane by Murakami standards, but that doesn't mean they're in the least disappointing. There's a theater actor who hires a woman to be his driver, and unloads the story about his wife's death and possible infidelities. There a fellow who gets a call in the middle of the night informing him a former girlfriend has committed suicide. And there's even a shut-in whose care-taker comes over, has sex with him, proclaims to have been a lamprey eel in a past laugh, and tells him various stories (yeah, this last one is probably approaching the Murakami you know and love).

But my favorite in the collection is actually the most Murakami-ish. It's titled "Kino," about a guy named Kino who catches his wife cheating on him with one of his co-workers and quits his job to open a bar. Weird things happen, including a cat that shows up periodically (I told you it's Murakami-ish). There's a mysterious guy named Kamita who comes in periodically and sits at the end of the bar reading big books. Kamita eventually warns him that he needs to close the bar and escape. Which he does, though he's not sure why. And it rains a lot, and he finally feels sadness about his divorce. It's so awesome, such a strange, mysterious little story.

Another story, titled "Samsa In Love," is also just amusingly weird — Murakami imagines if Kafka's cockroach woke up as Gregor Samsa, a reverse Metamorphosis! And the Samsa character is surprised when he discovers sexual desire for a handy-woman who comes over to fix a lock.

The most serious story is "Yesterdays," which weaves Murakami's love of the Beatles with a story about how love is often about timing, and how about reminiscing about love often gives it more weight than it had in the moment. It's a really terrific, insightful story — about the most "normal" thing from Murakami I've read. I loved this one too.

There are a few misses here, but overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. Murakami is just so droll, here, so strangely goofy, that you can't help but smirk along with him.