The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Each of the stories in the collection has a different narrator. They vary in age, gender, and educational or professional background, but they also share some important similarities. Most of them are relatively young, in either their late twenties or early thirties (nearly all of the stories contain explicit references to the narrator’s age). The narrators also tend to wrestle with issues of Existential Anxiety in the Modern World, solitude, and questions about the nature of Perception Versus Reality.

Many of the narrators share an existential uncertainty about their place in life—a theme that ties the stories together. The narrator of the first story of the collection, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” feels as though “somewhere, in [his] head, in [his] body, in [his] very existence, it’s as if there were some long-lost subterranean element that’s been skewing [his] life ever so slightly off” (14), while the narrator of the last story of the collection, “The Elephant Vanishes,” expresses a very similar feeling “that things around [him] have lost their proper balance, though it could be that [his] perceptions are playing tricks on [him]” (327).

Other narrators seem to have a more fundamental dissatisfaction with their existence. Take, for example, the narrator of “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” who confesses that his only wish is to “to be able to be in two places at once” (64). The narrator of “Sleep,” similarly, only feels fully actualized when she abandons sleep.

Though many of Murakami’s narrators have families or romantic partners, they are almost all isolated in some way, and seem to find more meaning and safety in their own internality rather than in their social relationships. Sometimes this isolation is imposed by others (as it is for the character of Ozawa in “The Silence” or for the narrator of “The Dancing Dwarf” at the end of the story), while other times it is self-imposed (as it is for the narrator of “Sleep”). In many stories, the narrators must wrestle with complicated or superficial social or familial relationships. The narrator of “Family Affair” becomes self-isolating because he is incapable of maintaining a serious romantic relationship, flitting from one sexual partner to another. In other stories, such as “A Slow Boat to China,” the narrator’s isolation is a result of a tendency to harm others without meaning too.

To some extent, isolation is inevitable in Murakami’s worlds, where reality (like memory) is an essentially creative process. The narrator of “A Window,” reflecting on his experience as a “Pen Master,” comes to the conclusion that “the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make. It is this that gives birth to meaning” (191). While most of the narrators live in the normal world and tackle ordinary problems, others live in surreal, imagined worlds of Murakami’s own creation. The narrator of “The Dancing Dwarf” lives in an alternative world where magical dwarves and elephant factories are the norm. The narrator of “The Little Green Monster” must battle a strange mind-reading creature unlike anything in our reality.

For many of the narrators and characters, reality is a tenuous thing, highlighting one of Murakami’s central themes: Perception Versus Reality. The narrator of “TV People” doubts his own existence when he sees the slightly-smaller-than-usual TV People install a television set in his apartment (something that goes completely unacknowledged by his wife). While one could interpret this narrator’s encounter with TV People as a hallucination, other narrators also wrestle with the nature of reality. The narrator of “Barn Burning,” for example, feels as though “the reality of everything around [him is] being siphoned away” (134) as he watches his friend, an amateur mime, peel an imaginary bowl of mandarin oranges. In “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” the narrator’s meditation on the machinery of the world is in many ways emblematic of the existential anxiety of all of Murakami’s narrators: “Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me” (31).