Men Without Women: Stories

Introduction

The book contains seven stories about men who lost their women, either alive or dead. The stories portray the feelings, reaction and emotions of those men who lost their women. Or a man and a woman could be nothing but just business. Haruki Murakami extracted feelings not elaborated and emotions that could not be explained when men lost their women or being cheated by the beloved one. Either the man was the one being cheated or the man was a crime in partner, when a man decided that he could not live without his woman, sometimes he could do nothing but give up his life. Seven stories, seven lives let readers take a peek of the protagonists.

Body

The author is known to include erotic scenes in his books. He clearly portrays the important part that sex is playing in a relationship between a man and a woman. When men in these stories got cheated by the wife, they often started brainstorming what they were lacking, starting from sex. Then they continued on other factors like emotional or financial support. Often times they didn’t figure out the reasons why their wives cheated on them. Mysteries remained as a part for the rest of their lives. Men could be sleeping with a married woman without even knowing her name like Habara in Scheherazade. A man could also be get caught lying on a death bed with fatal anorexia because he couldn’t be with a woman he shouldn’t be with like Dr. Tokai in An Independent Organ.

Conclusion

In these stories, the author tried to understand and explain how a man thinks in the relationship department. He also includes how they individually reacted the lost or disappearing of their beloved women. Or a man could be a simple creature made up of flailing body parts and organs full of lust. For example, Gregor Samsa in Samsa in Love noticed his man organ erecting after simply seeing a woman, not an ordinary one but a hunchback. As being one of the two biological genders of Homo Sapiens species, the author attempted on discovering different aspects of the man’s mind rather than saying the man is more or less simple or complex or manipulative than woman.

Here’s the link to the book’s Amazon page.

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