Men Without Women cover art

Men Without Women

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for £5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Men Without Women

By: Haruki Murakami
Narrated by: Bruno Roubicek
Try Standard free

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.

©2014 Haruki Murakami (P)2017 W. F. Howes Ltd Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Short Stories Heartfelt Witty Mind-bending

Critic reviews

"Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility." ( Guardian on Norwegian Wood)
"Brilliantly combines elements of the surreal, film noir and existentialist enquiry." ( Sunday Times on Dance, Dance, Dance)
All stars
Most relevant
Taking​ the title from the original Ernest Hemingway novel, Haruki Murakami has updated it for a modern audience in different parts of the world, primarily Japan.

It is a series of portraits of men who have chosen the path of loneliness away from women and the void that it creates when running away from intimacy. Beautiful, simplistic with a wonderful flow, Murakami has a spectacular way of building characters and their anecdotal narratives.

Modern day Hemingway

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
As with most collections of short stories, some are better others, but overall the quality is really high. My personal favourite is the one about the bar owner. Very good narration too, pacing and intonation are spot on.

7 stories... 4 excellent, 3 merely good

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
My first Murakami book. It left me with the impression that the author is interested in heterosexual men romantic loneliness, and women having multiple sexual partners. As I have no way to draw comparisons with other Murakami audiobooks, I think the performance was good as it was neutral and allowed me to fill the emotional blanks.

About the stories themselves, Murakami's narrative is always interesting and agile, and there's a couple of stories that will stay with me. Overall an interesting book to accompany your daily activities.

Overall fun

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I have loved some recent books and this narration by Bruno Roubicek throws into relief the importance, the vital importance, of a good narrator. The writing had a deadened, flat quality and Murakami is never dead or flat. I really didn't like this (as you might have gathered, lol).

Murakami deserves better

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I found the Japanese context quite interesting but ultimately the stories were a bit monolithic and somewhat odd. There's also a sense of the stories ending abruptly, perhaps because the author had run out of steam on that idea. Not really an attention grabber, I was quite keen to get to the end of this audio book.

Culturally interesting, slightly offbeat stories

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews