Writing Analysis of “Drive My Car” by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is the terrific Japanese writer who, among other works, wrote 1Q84. “Drive My Car” is the first story in his most recently released book of short stories titled “Men Without Women.” I don’t know how much of a Hemingway fan he is, but that’s the same title Hemingway gave to a book of his short stories.

“Drive My Car” is written, mostly, in third-person limited point of view but with a first-person POV sentence with a “we” in the very first paragraph. If you did this in a writing critique, you would immediately be called out. But of course Murakami, like all great writers, makes it work and draws you deeper into the story because now you’re a part of it.

The story starts out a little chauvinistic with the third-person narrator giving a critique of the types of women drivers out there, separating them into mostly either too aggressive or too timid. I read the opening to my girlfriend, who said, “whatever.” But that opening sets up the rest of the story with the main character, who has made a career as a character actor, discussing trying to come to terms with his leading-actress wife’s four affairs.

It’s titled “Drive My Car” because the main character, Kafuku, has had a minor accident and lost his driving privileges. He was apparently drunk, but that was kept out of the news. So he hires a woman who is 24 to drive him around, and they talk, and Kafuku tells some of his story to the young woman driver, but most of it is a reverie as he recalls the past. Part of…