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A review by frasersimons
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
reflective
medium-paced
2.0
I picked this up purely because I thought Drive My Car, the movie, was an absolute masterpiece. And I wondered if there was more insight or context given in the story it was based off of. And I was slightly curious if I’d change my mind about Murakami being for me. Turns out, no and no.
The short story has the same character names and the husband and wife have the same professions, as well as the woman driving his car has the same personality (and because it’s Murakami we know exactly how large her breasts are). But everything else, save for the unlikely friendship between the husband and other man, is different—including how the friendship-type thing happens, why he needs a driver, the drivers backstory. Nearly everything that makes the movie interesting, essentially, is not present in the short story.
What IS interesting, slightly, is one of the stories the wife tells the husband in the movie is one of the other stories in this collection, about the woman who thinks she’s a lamprey. But that entire story is about half of the one in the movie. Still. Kind of neat.
As for the rest of this collection, I think there is a pretty large generational gap. I’m of the mind that if you’re not okay without a person, you probably shouldn’t be inflicting yourself onto someone else. Codependency is not romantic. Though, the topic of mental health in men is a large one and can be interesting, nothing explored here really piqued my interest. Most of the time they are simply not equipped to know what’s happening with them, which is a thing with men, and The Loneliness Epidemic is a real issue, it’s just that the metaphors and abstractions used to elicit that sense here weren’t moving. Thats why I think there’s probably a generational gap at play.
The short story has the same character names and the husband and wife have the same professions, as well as the woman driving his car has the same personality (and because it’s Murakami we know exactly how large her breasts are). But everything else, save for the unlikely friendship between the husband and other man, is different—including how the friendship-type thing happens, why he needs a driver, the drivers backstory. Nearly everything that makes the movie interesting, essentially, is not present in the short story.
What IS interesting, slightly, is one of the stories the wife tells the husband in the movie is one of the other stories in this collection, about the woman who thinks she’s a lamprey. But that entire story is about half of the one in the movie. Still. Kind of neat.
As for the rest of this collection, I think there is a pretty large generational gap. I’m of the mind that if you’re not okay without a person, you probably shouldn’t be inflicting yourself onto someone else. Codependency is not romantic. Though, the topic of mental health in men is a large one and can be interesting, nothing explored here really piqued my interest. Most of the time they are simply not equipped to know what’s happening with them, which is a thing with men, and The Loneliness Epidemic is a real issue, it’s just that the metaphors and abstractions used to elicit that sense here weren’t moving. Thats why I think there’s probably a generational gap at play.