![]() ![]() It is not hard to imagine Murakami’s characters, the men and the women, haunting the clean, well-lighted insomniac cafes of Hemingway, or savoring the soul-ache crooning of Chet Baker on vinyl. Murakami’s protagonists, often playing the role of mute witnesses, are men who have walled themselves inside metaphysical caves, who have warmed their adopted solitude with distant blue valentines while deriving sustenance from Memory, men whose carefully cultivated dams are crumbling due to age, mortality and circumstance, allowing a backwash of emotion to flood their interior. Men Without Women, a title borrowed from Hemingway’s 1927 collection of stories, bears ancestral resemblance to the shorter work of Hemingway sans the masculine mettle and tough-guy stoicism. ![]() Claustrophobic poignancy and stringent wistfulness, shot through with quirky humor, characterize the autumn-flavored tone of the seven stories comprising the collection. ![]() This poem from the Zen monk, Ryokan, could serve as an emblematic preface to Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women. ![]()
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