The narrator laments, "We've become men without women,"
and I agree that's a truly horrible state to find oneself in, but I can't
remember how it happened to this character. I do remember the final word, in
this story, the final story in the collection, is "probably." That
word is the leitmotif for the collection, his narrators across the stories use
it repeatedly as they mull over events of the past, which is pretty much all
they do. After analyzing some condition, or act, to death: offering thesis,
critique of thesis, restatement of thesis, and concluding with an expression of belief that thesis is all that can be known of the matter under review, the whole business is then qualified with that most unsatisfactory of affirmatives,
"probably."
Because "probably" can only mean "possibly
not."
It's
remarkable that Murakami can devote a whole book to stories in the key of
"probably," but the lack of interesting development is a curious
aesthetic choice, almost a stubborn decision to reign in the imagination, for
an author whose unrestrained imagination has led to the grand, mythological
novels his millions of fans worldwide adore. In my case, Murakami's "Kafka
on the Shore" remains not a book I read, it's an experience.
(I
am currently having a similar 'experience' in the company of the novel
"Jerusalem" by English novelist Alan Moore." I think of rare
imaginative feats such as these as: 'the universe explained.')
Perhaps
an author capable of imaginative extravaganzas such as these needs to spend a
few years, occasionally, walking around a familiar block in a familiar city, going over the same
ground again and again in his head. Probably.
The
most imaginative leap in this collection is the story told by a female narrator of an adolescent crush
that causes her to break into the house of the boy she is enamored of to steal
articles from his room. It's psychologically acute. But nothing much develops from this premise. This is no more than to be expected -- probably.
Most of these tales center on men who have for whatever reason one chance in life at a relationship that
goes beyond sex -- there is plenty of emotionally detached sex in this book:
can anything be more boring? -- and for whatever reason, it might not even be
their fault, missed it. One character returns home early from a business trip and finding
his wife in bed with a friend tactfully closes the bedroom door and moves
out of his apartment. Is this a peculiarly Japanese response?
I've
looked it up, so here's how the narrator of that title story in
"Men Without Women" explains what happened to his relationship with M.
(that's all the name he gives her), the one woman in his life whose long-ago
loss has condemned him to the dreary status of male-without-female.
The
narrator recalls: "But before I knew it, M. was gone. Where to, I have no
idea. One day, I lost sight of her. I happened to glance for a moment, and when
I turned back, she had disappeared."
This
is about the most disappointing piece of plot development one can imagine. It's a metaphor, not a story.
At a polar opposite in aesthetic strategy, in the the most affecting of one of these stories -- the one about the
man whose discovers his wife in bed with a friend -- the narrator, who has
opened a small bar on a back street which he treats as a kind of hermit's
retreat, develops a spot of trouble with local gangsters. He closes up one
night and discovers snakes outside the bar, one of them curled up in a sidewalk
tree.
What
happens to -- or because of -- those snakes? Nothing, in this little book.
I'm
looking forward to learning more about them, or their metaphysical equivalents,
in a future 'big' book by Murakami. Probably.
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