Author - Haruki Murakami
 
Goodreads Rating - 3.76
 
Men Without Women (Japanese: 女のいない男たち, Hepburn: Onna no inai otokotachi) is a 2014 collection of short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, translated and published in English in 2017. The stories are about men who have lost women in their lives, usually to other men or death.  The collection shares its title with Ernest Hemingway's second short story collection.
 
An unnamed narrator receives a phone call in the middle of the night telling him that his former lover, who he dubs M, has committed suicide, the caller being M's husband. He is unbearably anguished upon learning of this news.
The narrator tells of how he imagines himself meeting M when they were fourteen and in junior high school. He asks her for an eraser in class and she breaks hers in half and gives the piece to him; this meeting warms his heart. She then breaks his heart by running off with sailors who promise to show her the world. He chases her, but is never able to catch up.
 
In reality, he knew her for only about two years in his adult life and they only saw each other a few times a month. She loves elevator music, and always plays "A Summer Place" when they have sex. He notes that because of her death, he now considers himself the second-loneliest man in the world, after her husband. He is also in a state called "Men Without Women," a period of sudden and intense misery after a man learns of the death of a beloved woman.
 
The short stories "Drive My Car" and, to a lesser degree, "Scheherazade", served as the basis for the 2021 film of the same name by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
 
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