There are no happy endings

Author : Haruki Murakami
Title : Men Without Women
Published : 09/05/2017
Pages : 240
Genre : Contemporary fiction
Publisher : Harvill Secker







     Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. 

    
     Murakami is an author who I have spent a fair bit of time with. His books always feel a bit odd or strange, but there is something that keeps bringing me back to them. it is at least for me never so simple when it comes to reviewing his books. This time even more so as it contains seven individual stories, there only connecting thread is the loss of a woman in each of these men's lives.

     Throughout the tales, you get the feeling that these men are all of about a certain age. They are looking back with regret as to actions taken or paths chosen. With this odd collection of leading characters, i can't say that I liked all of them. In many ways, it's difficult as you never really get to spend enough time with each of them. At least a couple I want to smack and tell them to grow up as the sowed the seeds of there own unhappiness. In a lot of ways, i struggled to get a handle on them. With his other books, i have read while the characters are diffidently odd you get a better grip[ on them as they are given many more pages to get to realize the motives behind there actions. 

     As for the women in these stories in so many ways felt like window dressing. A reason for these men to be unhappy without feeling fully formed. More than once I was desperate to know more about them only to be let down. For me it ended up making these stories less engaging, how am I suppose to feel the same loss as the men when I can't really understand why they cared so deeply for these women in the first place. And to be honest in more than one case you ended up feeling that if these men had treated them better to start with then just maybe they wouldn't have lost them. 

     This book was not entirely to my liking, for me it lacked much in what I have come to enjoy about this authors work. This coulomb is down to the very nature of the book in that it is short stories, something I don't usually tend to read.  With each of the seven sections, the story ends in what felt like mid-flow.I think this is supposed to give us the readers a time to reflect on the past events and gather our thoughts on the nature of each of these men. And to some extent it does work but for me, it just wasn't enough. There where moments within where I was able to grasp small parts of an author whose work I care for deeply. Then much like these stories they were gone too quick. At two hundred and forty page this isn't a long book so it didn't for the most part feel like I had wasted my time with it, and I know a lot of others have raved about it with exuberant bounds but for me I think I shall stick to his older work for the time being.