The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami
The inventive brilliance that has made Haruki Murakami an international sensation is on full display in the stories that make up The Elephant Vanishes.
In these tales, a guy witnesses his beloved elephant disappear into thin air; a newlywed couple experiences nighttime hunger crises that force them to rob a McDonald’s; and a young woman learns that she has developed an attraction to a small green monster that tunnels through her property. Murakami crosses the line between several realities in The Elephant Vanishes, which is alternately terrifying and humorous and returns with amazing treasures.
The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami
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The Elephant Vanishes depicts the very contemporary, very industrialized, and the highly urban world from which manga and anime originate. Manga and anime, in my opinion, serve as a release valve for the real world or as an alternative reality to the ordinary one. Murakami is a writer who conjures up fantastic images of the odd aspects of our everyday reality. Some refer to Murakami as a magical realist because he depicts the weird phenomena that permeate our everyday world. Additionally, his characters are so realistic that you could easily picture them watching anime.
Murakami writes about powerful women. One thing I admire about Japan is that, despite having a very strong patriarchal culture the one hand, it also prioritizes strong women in fiction. The Elephant Vanishes collection has one of my favourite stories, “Sleep,” in which a woman who leads a relatively dull existence with a nice dentist husband and son stops sleeping. She stays up late reading Russian literature from the nineteenth century while consuming chocolate and whiskey.
In spite of the fact that I enjoyed reading them the first time around, Murakami’s short stories deal with heavy subjects in such a precise and sensitive way that the second time around, I found them to be even more entertaining. The Kangaroo Communique is the third tale in the anthology. It is written in the second person by a male department store clerk in response to a female customer’s letter of complaint. The next story is a story within a story within a story, and it is titled On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning. Both are Murakami-style love stories that both transmit objective experience and subjective reality. The Silence is my particular favourite of the group.
In it, a man describes how he was rejected in high school because of a malicious lie. Due to the mental training, he gained from the martial art of boxing, he continues to be unbeatable by his tormentors. Murakami’s work is educational in a variety of ways and is replete with information about psychology, history, and culture. Amazingly, his 500+ page novels may not even be as full as this short fiction.
