Drive My Car
Contents (5)
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, whose previous recipients include Karl Ove Knausgård, Isabel Allende, and Salman Rushdie.
Books by HARUKI MURAKAMI
Fiction
IQ84
After Dark
After the Quake
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Dance Dance Dance
The Elephant Vanishes
First Person Singular
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Kafka on the Shore
Killing Commendatore
Norwegian Wood
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Sputnik Sweetheart
The Strange Library
A Wild Sheep Chase
Wind/Pinball
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Nonfiction
Absolutely on Music (with Seiji Ozawa)
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir
Murakami T
Drive My Car
from Men Without Women
Haruki Murakami
A Vintage Short
Vintage Books
A Division of Penguin Random House LLC
New York
English translation copyright © 2017 by Haruki Murakami
Originally published in Japan as Onna no inai otokotachi by Bungei Shunjū Ltd., Tokyo, in 2014.
Copyright © 2014 by Haruki Murakami
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published as part of Men Without Women in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 2017.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Men Without Women is available from the Library of Congress.
Vintage Short Ebook ISBN 9780593469781
Cover design by Madeline Partner
Cover photograph © Janus Films
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Books by Haruki Murakami
Title Page
Copyright
Drive My Car
based on the many times he had ridden in cars driven by women, Kafuku had reached the conclusion that most female drivers fell into one of two categories: either they were a little too aggressive or a little too timid. Luckily—and we should all be grateful for this—the latter were far more common. Generally speaking, women were more cautious than men behind the wheel. Of course, that caution was nothing to complain about. Yet their driving style tended to irritate others on the road.
Most of the aggressive women, on the other hand, seemed convinced they were great drivers. In most cases, they showed their timid sisters nothing but scorn, and were proud that they, at least, weren’t like that. They were oblivious to the gasps and slammed brakes that accompanied their sudden and daring lane changes, and to the less-than-complimentary words directed at them by their fellow drivers.
Of course, not all women belonged to one of those two groups. There were those normal drivers who were neither too aggressive nor too cautious. Some could even be called experts. Nevertheless, somehow or other, even with those expert female drivers, Kafuku usually sensed a certain tension. There was no concrete reason that he could point to, but from where he sat in the passenger seat he felt a kind of friction in the air, and it made him tense. His throat would turn dry, or he would start saying foolish, totally unnecessary things just to bury the silence.