For while the male protagonists are often forgettable, Murakami’s art shines in his creation of the strong, colorful female characters that populate his fiction, such as the teenage May Kasahara in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the eccentric Sumire of Sputnik Swetheart, and most prominently the indomitable Aomame (“Green Peas”) of his masterpiece, 1Q84.įortunately, there are plenty of such strong females in Men Without Women, a collection of previously released and original short stories that first appeared in Japan in 2014, and published in translation (by Phillip Gabriel and Ted Goosen) in the United States on May 9, 2017-which may or may not be coincidental to the 1927 publication by Ernest Hemingway of his identically titled collection, ninety years prior. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.” I always thought it was a great quote, but far more appropriate for that book’s male central character, Toru Watanabe, than for her. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. In his celebrated novel Norwegian Wood, Murakami has Reiko Ishida, the woman in the mountain asylum, say: “I’m much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. I have read all of Murakami’s fiction to date, and to my mind his male characters, for the most part, are average, passive, weak-willed, apathetic, and decidedly boring. I must admit that I winced just a little when I took in the title of Haruki Murakami’s most recent release, Men Without Women.
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