"Men Without Women" to Come out in English in May 2017

Men without Women, the English-language translation of the short story collection Onna no inai otokotachi, will appear on May 9, 2017.  The collection came out in Japan in 2014, after four of the six stories had appeared in Bungei Shunju and one in Monkey. The English-language edition follows the same pattern, since some of the stories have already been published in The New Yorker.  Here are the titles with links:  "Scheherazade" (October 23, 2014), "Kino" (February 23 and March 5, 2015, and "Yesterday" (9-16 June, 2014). The remaining three ("Independent Organ," "Drive My Car" and "Men without Women") are not available in English yet -- at least not in authorized translations.  

Since the description on the UK Amazon page refers to seven stories, one assumes that the collection will also include the story "Samsa in Love" (The New Yorker, October 28, 2013), as was the case with other language translations, although it wasn't a part of the original Japanese volume. 

Here are the American and the British covers. The translators are Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. 

You can find the announcements on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. The UK page offers the following description:

"A dazzling new collection of short stories--the first major new work of fiction from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami since his #1 best-selling Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. 

"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."

 I have written on this blog in the past about the similarity of the title to the 1927 Hemingway collection of stories, "Men without Women." You can find those posts here and here.