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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the cause of Dr. Tokai's death?

2. Within one of Scheherazade's stories, she confides in Habara that she had been a high school junior when she first took what action?

3. How many years older than Habara is Scheherazade?

4. When Kino first sees the bald man come into his establishment, he pegs him as a what?

5. While Scheherazade's days coming to see Habara are not fixed, it is specified that she never comes when?

Short Essay Questions

1. Dr. Tokai describes himself to the narrator using what two adjectives?

2. How is vivid imagery employed within Scheherazade's depiction of her former life as a lamprey eel?

3. In what ways is the unnamed narrator of "An Independent Organ" suggested to be possibly unreliable?

4. What attitude does the unnamed narrator have about the prospect of having children?

5. When the narrator states that Dr. Tokai had displayed no signs of an unstable personality, what traits does he list as being absent within Dr. Tokai's personality?

6. What are Kino's feelings toward his ex-wife and her lover, who had also been Kino's colleague?

7. Describe Scheherazade's routine upon arriving at Habara's house twice per week.

8. In what way is foreshadowing employed within the narrator's memory of his last conversation with Dr. Tokai?

9. How does the theme of appearance versus reality emerge within the stories that Scheherazade tells to Habara?

10. What is the symbolism inherent in Kino's bar?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

William Faulkner once famously claimed that the most important literature deals with the subject of the human heart in conflict with itself. Explain how the theme of Human versus Self is demonstrated within Haruki Murakami's short story collection Men Without Women. Create a decisive, arguable claim and prove it with quotes from the book.

Essay Topic 2

Determine the author's message regarding the maxim that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Essay Topic 3

What is the short story collection's message concerning the link between love and loss?

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