Thank heavens. They are merely artificial figures, the men who lead a strange dreary existence in the seven short stories by Haruki Murakami. Without women, they must not get along, but they come with those who have somehow not right together. So they despair almost to their isolation, to missing or incorrect love, and it can not comfort them that it was a brilliant author who brought them into this situation with disturbing imagination and deceptive simplicity.
are strange, anyway remarkable, slightly bizarre specimens of the species man, the author introduces us to the world quite successful, but outwardly unremarkable, colorless beings to boredom, sometimes adventurous, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes “not a hint of feeling” , sometimes melancholic and plaintive in their crisis.
Mr Kafuku about, 47 and successful actor, his wife has lost after twenty years of marriage. She was very beautiful, also an actress, and until her death, he was faithful to her in love. You, however, he knew more “intuitive” than fact, had at least four younger lover.
Although unbearable images invaded her and the other men like knives in his innermost being, he had never asked her the question of why, already not the same in the face of her impending death from cancer. Instead, he was in private life another role in a “theater without an audience”: a trivial, average married life, “as if nothing”. “He did his best,” but the unsolved mystery haunts him to this day.
Kafukus emotionally incriminating role awaits him when he meets the last ex-sex partner of his wife.
Mr. Takatsuki (40, unhappily married, one child) is also an actor, but “a second-rate” only “suitable for the role of the lover.” As “like-minded drinking buddies”, the men regularly meet in a bar and talk about women in general and about their special (s) partner (NEN) in particular. As a supposedly ignorant to Kafuku approaches the rivals, track his weak points and can then throw him into the abyss.
But which is already on the ground. Still caught up in love, he tells his audience with tears in his eyes, that his mistress had abruptly dumped him. That he, when he learned of her death suffering and wanted to visit her bedside, was dismissed again, it tears literally the heart.
Also regrets Kafuku, to have understood his sweetheart. Takatsuki shows sincere sympathy. Do not be defeated all men with this “kind of blindness”? “We can quite understand what is going on in the head of a woman never.” By the two men give comfort to one another without a woman, though Kafukus anger faded on his opponent, but remains in his heart the sting, the wife has put her relationship with such a mundane man. What was their motive?
finds no answer to that nagging question, but excited by another copy of the enigmatic sex Kafuku when he temporarily his driving license loses (alcohol, eye problems, rear-end collision …) and you Misaki Watari recommends him as competent chauffeur. The twenty-four year old “roughneck” from the country is not a sight for sore eyes (strong physique, acne scars, ears like “radar dishes”), but docile, unobtrusive and a good listener. You only need to bring every night to the theater and pick up again after the performance their employer. During the trip, studying Kafuku his roles or hear American Oldies, but by hiding quiet intimacy is established, we speak to each other. Once she asked him whether he was a woman, have a friend? And Mr. Kafuku reported Misaki frankly …
plastic surgeon Dr. Tokai must also suffer. It drives the 52-year-old deliberately only with married women – because he has no stress, no responsibility. When he but madly in love with a much younger woman, it caught him in the end, even though she was married. Like all women, she is a “stand-alone lies organ” “from birth” equipped. After a moment’s pleasure she puts him down like a worn shoe. Dr. Tokai suffering torments of love, denied any food intake until the end, as once the Suppenkasper, weighs only half a Lot and dies. He has dissolved itself.
Haruki Murakami’s stories (translated by Ursula Grafe) act like verbalized Japanese ink drawings. clarified his stories flow, calmly and unadorned then, irony-free and objective, so that one imagines himself on solid ground. The further you progress, the more comes to uncertainty as to move in the sunlight on thin ice. The floor mat shines; But what may be lurking under the milky translucent surface? Is not there a plan? Can easily slip on which one a reality.
That is, have to cope in Murakami’s characters the world. “Kafuku firmly believed in the superiority of the truth.” “Only through knowledge gained human strength.” But truth and knowledge are as little accessible, as the essence of the other and their relations can be seen through each other. The people are linked together and yet do not come together as if they were separated by thin rice paper walls. Suspicion, questions, doubts, fragments … All considerations remain ultimately speculative. If not available on truth “do Sometimes women such thing” as a banal, resignatives, man remains weak, and “we have no choice but to come to terms with ourselves.”
most of the stories “from men who do not women have” standing on the floor of a tangible reality. The penultimate but ( “Samsa in Love”) takes off and ancestor Franz Kafka takes just outside. Reusing numerous original designs and formulations Murakami turns the “transformation” on ludicrous way around: “When he awoke, he found himself in his bed in Gregor Samsa turns on his back, he looked at the ceiling It took a while.. until his eyes had adjusted to the gloom of the room. ” Ex-beetle Gregor, thrown into a human existence without the trace of a statement has as his literary counterpart to learn how to arrange it. Fear of birds is still deep, the soft, fragile, pale body is unfamiliar and cumbersome to move, and how to deal with clothing or the urgent hunger with knife and fork should be appeased, are two of the many questions that worry him.
Even the doorbell shrieks. A small, crooked young woman with hump asks briskly for entrance. They had ordered them, repaired a door lock; they have made themselves dutifully on the dangerous route through Prague. ” The world is falling into ruins – what was probably Gregor Samsa had no idea Foreign troops, checkpoints, tanks … everything a mystery?..”
A riddle is it also the repeated jerky screwing movements the hunchbacked girl (from which Hieronymus Bosch intermediate world they may be devised?). Your reasoning does not help him, he ( “BH”) has never heard the decisive word in it. While he was watching her at work, a “wonderful warmth in his heart” rises, and the unusually shaped genitals between his legs began an incomprehensible life of its own … But they also know little about Gregor as he about them, it is surprising not if she believes: “as a woman you have it harder than you can ever imagine it.” Women who are not men, are just as incomplete as men who have no women.
Of Men Who Have No Women Of Haruki Murakami Review. (2019, Nov 18). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/of-men-who-have-no-women-of-haruki-murakami-my-review/