Having befriended Takatsuki for this purpose, Kafaku is told by Takatsuki that, the proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game.

Kafaku’s final attempt to posthumously seek revenge on her last lover, Takatsuki, was really an attempt to understand his own failing what he lacked that his wife needed. Kafaku, it turns out, lost his wife to ovarian cancer, but before that, he already sensed his loss over the course of her four affairs with fellow actors. Misaki remains professionally detached while Kafaku practises his lines in the car over the months that she drives him, until she wonders about his lonely existence. He is forced to engage the services of Misaki Watari, a plain woman whose driving skills overcome his prejudices about female drivers. In the first story, ‘Drive my Car’, Kafaku, a middle-aged actor, has been banned from driving after he was caught over the limit, and then found to have glaucoma. Yet connecting all these stories from first to last, is the idea that our identity – our sense of self – is not possible to know, except by examining our relationships with others. The stories reflect the stylistic range of Murakami’s longer fiction, from realistic narratives, to increasingly surreal or unsettling stories of loss or alienation. As suggested by the title, each of the stories has a male protagonist whose relationship with women is the subject. Men Without Women is a collection of seven short stories by Haruki Murakami.

Men without women stories