"Men who have lost women are like that," Murakami writes somewhere in the middle of this collection. And I found myself pausing the audiobook, standing on the lakefront with the wind cutting through my jacket, thinking about every student I've ever taught who was too young to understand what that sentence really means.
My students would hate this. I love it.
That's become my litmus test for literature that matters. If teenagers would find it "boring" or "nothing happens," there's a decent chance we're dealing with something that requires the kind of emotional mileage you can't fake. Murakami's seven stories here are about absence—the shape a woman leaves behind when she's gone, whether through death, divorce, or just the slow erosion of connection. It's not dramatic. It's not cathartic. It's just... true.
The Quiet Devastation of Being Left Behind
What Murakami does better than almost any living writer is capture the specific loneliness of men who don't know how to talk about loneliness. These aren't tragic heroes. They're bartenders, actors, doctors—regular guys who wake up one day and realize they've been hollowed out. "Yesterday" follows a man remembering a friend from his youth who spoke in Kansai dialect despite being from Tokyo, a deliberate performance of identity that masked something deeper. "Drive My Car"—yes, the one they made into that gorgeous, meditative film—gives us an actor who hires a young woman to drive him to rehearsals, and the silences between them become a kind of confession.
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing—that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Murakami works the same way. The surface is calm, almost mundane. The devastation is all underneath.
Murakami pulls off the same trick in Wild Sheep Chase, where an absurd premise slowly reveals itself to be a story about grief and identity—the iceberg principle working overtime.Heyborne's Reserved Precision (And Why Some People Hate It)
Kirby Heyborne narrates like a man who's been trained to never raise his voice. There's a precision to his delivery that matches Murakami's prose—careful, measured, almost clinical. For me, listening during a faculty meeting I was definitely paying attention to (I wasn't), his restraint felt appropriate. These characters aren't emotionally demonstrative. They're Japanese men written by a Japanese author who understands that cultural context shapes how grief gets expressed.
But I get why some listeners find him too polished. One reviewer compared him to "a real estate agent trying to act cool," and okay, I can hear that. There's a smoothness that occasionally tips into performance-aware-of-itself. If you prefer narrators who disappear entirely into the text, Heyborne might pull you out at moments. His character differentiation is subtle to the point of barely existing—tone shifts rather than distinct voices.
I noticed the same quality in his narration of Hungry For You—that measured smoothness that works beautifully for certain material and creates distance in others.Here's the thing, though. I'm not sure distinct voices would serve this material. These men are all variations on a theme. They're meant to blur together somewhat. The prose deserves to be savored, and Heyborne gives it room to breathe.
The Gregor Samsa Story Is Wild
I need to mention "Samsa in Love" because it's the strangest thing in the collection and nobody warned me. Murakami imagines Kafka's cockroach waking up as a human—a reversal of the original transformation—and falling in love with a hunchbacked locksmith. It's surreal and tender and completely out of left field. If you're expecting seven variations of melancholy realism, this one will throw you. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. (Again, I was definitely listening to Principal Martinez's budget presentation.)
Who This Is For—And Who Should Walk Away
If you need plot, skip this. If you need resolution, skip this. If you need characters who learn lessons and grow and change, absolutely skip this.
But if you've ever been the person left behind—if you've ever felt the specific weight of loving someone who's no longer there to receive it—Murakami gets it. He's not going to fix it for you. He's just going to sit with you in that feeling for seven hours and eighteen minutes.
I listened at 1.0x because the author chose those words. The translators—Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen—chose their English equivalents with care. Speeding through would be like fast-forwarding through the pauses in a Chekhov play. The silence is part of the text.
Worth the Walk Along the Lakefront
Denise asked me what I was listening to when I came home quieter than usual. I tried to explain and couldn't, quite. "Stories about men who've lost women," I said. "It's sadder than it sounds." She nodded like she understood, which she probably did.
This is why we still read the classics—and why Murakami, despite being our contemporary, already feels like one. He's writing about something permanent. The loneliness doesn't date. The confusion doesn't resolve. And somehow that's comforting.
My students would hate this. I love it. And I suspect Obama, who called it out specifically, understands exactly why.
