What I'm Reading: Men Without Women - Stories

By Haruki Murakami

What I’m Reading is a monthly feature of So Much Stuff, offering brief excerpts from contemporary novels and story collections you’ll want to add to your TBR pile.

A wrenching sadness cuts against the wry humor and offbeat situations of the seven stories in Haruki Murkami’s 2018 collection Men Without Women. Special thanks to Santa (also known as my brother and sister-in-law) for sending this lovely collection my way.

In “Yesterday,” Tanimura recollects his college-era friendship with the puzzling and at times frustrating Kitaru, who’d been his co-worker at a coffee shop. Here’s the story’s opening:

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As far as I know, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song “Yesterday” (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath.

Yesterday
Is two days before tomorrow,
The day after two days ago.

This is how it began, as I recall, but I haven’t heard it for a long time and I’m not positive that’s how it went. From start to finish, though, Kitaru’s lyrics were almost meaningless nonsense that had nothing to do with the original words. That familiar lovely, melancholy melody paired with the breezy Kansai dialect—which you might call the opposite of pathos—made for a strange combination, a bold denial of anything constructive. At least, that’s how it sounded to me. At the time, I just listened and shook my head. I was able to laugh it off, but I also read a kind of hidden import in it.

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You can find Men Without Women HERE. Happy reading!

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