Murakami is proving himself time and again as one who is improving with maturity. One might not have expected that of a writer who might at first have been perceived as something of a novelty act.The strangeness is increasingly assimilated into stories ostensibly more rooted in idenitifiable ordinariness. The one piece that works less well here almost acknowledges the fact as, in Samsa in Love, the first person narrator wakes to find he has turned into Gregor Samsa. The literary joke might be good enough for others but we usually expect Murakami's off-kilter reality to be a bit more subtle.
Otherwise, these seven stories provided a marvellous weekend, that unfortunate sort of book that is so enjoyable you both want it to last longer but you want to read it at once, too.
The title wrongfoots the reader's expectations. In all of the pieces, men are very much not without women but they are usuaally in temporary, unofficial relationships rather than 'steady' or married ones. It is at the core of all Muraakami, and apparently much contemporary Japaanese literature, that to be human is to be solitary but capable of intense, if non-permanent, attachments.
Both Kino and the final story, Men Without Women, - oh, now I get it - end with sustained elegiac passages that vaguely bring to mind Joyce's The Dead without any suggestion of anything quite so magnificent but we are by now way beyond regarding Murakami as some vogue, cult or exercise in cool. These pieces work like poems with their leitmotifs, restraint and elegance rather than narrative impetus. If there is a compulsion or intensity about their accounts of love, it is with an acknowledgement that it is not a fixed, stable condition but mutable and, like music, moves on.
It is a quiet book, for the most part, not undramatic but distanced by the narrative devices of looking back or putting a story within a story. Its effect accumulates from a relaxed, unintrusive prose style, that one understands the two American translators have succeeded in capturing from the Japanese. The best prose is often the most transparent, that one doesn't notice until one has appreciated that one hasn't noticed it.
Having been in on the Murakami story for so many years now, and wondering at times in the early stages quite where it was leading, it is very satisfying to have been led this far, to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and now this. There is no conceivable reason why there shouldn't be plenty more to come.