Men Without Women

by Haruki Murakami

Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.

“Becoming somebody different,” Misaki said. “That’s right.” “And then going back to who you are.” “That’s right,” Kafuku said.

“Whether you want to or not. But the place you return to is always slightly different from the place you left. That’s the rule. It can never be exactly the same.”

the proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game.

I don’t care how well we think we should understand them, or how much we love them. All it can do is cause us pain. Examining your own heart, however, is another matter. I think it’s possible to see what’s in there if you work hard enough at it. So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.”

But the self that one returned to was never exactly the same as the self that one had left behind.

Because, in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes who we are as people.

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s not easy to look for it.”

“Dreams are the kind of things you can—when you need to—borrow and lend out,”

Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt.

“A gentleman doesn’t talk much about the taxes he paid, or the women he sleeps with,”

This is what he told me. “I’ve been out with lots of woman who are much prettier than her, better built, with better taste, and more intelligent. But those comparisons are meaningless. Because to me she is someone special. A ‘complete presence,’ I guess you could call it. All of her qualities are tightly bound into one core. You can’t separate each individual quality to measure and analyze it, to say it’s better or worse than the same quality in someone else. It’s what’s in her core that attracts me so strongly. Like a powerful magnet. It’s beyond logic.”

It feels like our hearts have become intertwined. Like when she feels something, my heart moves in tandem. Like we’re two boats tied together with rope. Even if you want to cut the rope, there’s no knife sharp enough to do it. I’ve never experienced this—ever. And it scares me. If my feelings for her get even stronger, what in the world’s going to happen to me?”

Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie.

Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by the glow of something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how faded it appears. What was I looking at? you wonder.

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.”

“If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again,”

once you’ve become Men Without Women, loneliness seeps deep down inside your body, like a red-wine stain on a pastel carpet. No matter how many home ec books you study, getting rid of that stain isn’t easy. The stain might fade a bit over time, but it will still remain, as a stain, until the day you draw your final breath. It has the right to be a stain, the right to make the occasional, public, stain-like pronouncement.

That’s what it’s like to lose a woman. And at a certain time, losing one woman means losing all women. That’s how we become Men Without Women. We lose Percy Faith, Francis Lai, and 101 Strings. And ammonites and coelacanths. And we lose her beautiful back. I used to rub M’s back with my palm, in time to the soft triple beat of Henry Mancini’s version of “Moon River.” Waiting round the bend, my Huckleberry friend … But all of that has vanished. All that remains is an old broken piece of eraser, and the far-off sound of the sailors’ dirge. And the unicorn beside the fountain, his lonely horn aimed at the sky.