Review of Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women appearing in Riot Material.

“Men Without Women, a title borrowed from Hemingway’s 1927 collection of stories, bears ancestral resemblance to the shorter work of Hemingway sans the masculine mettle and tough-guy stoicism. Murakami’s protagonists, often playing the role of mute witnesses, are men who have walled themselves inside metaphysical caves, who have warmed their adopted solitude with distant blue valentines while deriving sustenance from Memory, men whose carefully cultivated dams are crumbling due to age, mortality and circumstance, allowing a backwash of emotion to flood their interior. It is not hard to imagine Murakami’s characters, the men and the women, haunting the clean, well-lighted insomniac cafes of Hemingway, or savoring the soul-ache crooning of Chet Baker on vinyl.”

To read the full review click here.