Customer Reviews

Elephant Vanishes

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is perhaps the best collection of 20th/21st century urban short stories I have ever read. Murakami's ability to create compelling characters in just a few paragraphs, and place them in absurd situations, is unrivaled.

Murakami is right on par with Raymond Carver, maybe even more challenging and interesting -- since Murakami's story premise is more often absurd and surreal, unlike Carver's "around the house and in the yard" focus. But the clipped sentences, the meetings of strangers, and the very self-aware male narrators, are quite similar.

"The Kangaroo Communique," which appears in this collection, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of short fiction -- and it actually reminds me more of Borges than of Carver. It is about kangaroos, and customer service at a department store, and stalkers, and the nature of self-representation.... well, just read it.

Thematic similarities between Murakami and Carver: lapses in communication, people just missing each other, chance encounters between urban strangers, etc. One major difference between the two writers is that Murakami is always in awe at the (sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes cruel) beauty of the world, while Carver tends to border on the morose.

Personally, I much prefer Murakami's stories to the one novel of Murakami's ("Hardboiled Wonderland") that I read -- his succinct, slightly neurotic, slightly dreamy first-person style is (in my opinion) best suited to the short story form.

Overall, these are exquisite short stories, perfect for the age of chance meetings, lonely drifting souls, and cyber-disconnectedness.... If you like these stories, you may also like Murakami's very imaginative and inventive novels. (I prefer his short stories, but that's just me.) For fans of clever, self-referential, semi-surreal short stories similar to Murakami's, I'd highly recommend the short story anthology "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges.

I was going on a road trip and needed something to read ... other than Sputnik Sweetheart, I'd already read all of Murakami's work, so I thought I'd give The Elephant Vanishes a shot. Am I ever glad I did!

Murakami shows off his trademark humor, wit, and versatility while spinning tales about his favorite topic: humanity. That's the best explanation I can give to someone who wants to know what kind of writer Murakami is: he writes about what it means to be alive. Love, death, life, Murakami deals with the whole spectrum of human existance with amazing skill and grace.

Listing my favorite stories in this work without listing the entire table of contents would be a challenge, but I think it would be fair to say that my favorites were "The Silence," "The Wind-up Bird" (from a longer Murakami novel), "The 100% Perfect Girl," and "The Kangaroo Communique." If you haven't read Murakami before, this would be a great book to get your feet wet with. If you're a Murakami fan but haven't read this one yet, what are you waiting for? "The Elephant Vanishes" is Murakami at his best.

I'm a big fan of Murakami's, but I love his short stories much better than his novels. it is the book you have to read to feel great to live on this planet with Murakami.some people say he is too American and his stories dont make any sense. why does a story have to make a sense? this life doesnt make any sense sometimes. I think his cute, little but deep and touching stories can touch your soul.They are strange, but beatiful. In some stories it is impossible to happen in your life time. but we can dream and imagine whatever we want. Call him a dreamer, and sentimentalist, but so are you.

A good book is like travel. Sometimes it's not the final destination that matters. It's the journey itself.

To really appreciate a Haruki Murakami novel it's important to adopt that perspective. I enjoy his writing, characters, and stories but often am frustrated at the end. They just stop. The main character comes to a certain growth point, and Murakami walks away from the plot and stops. He often doesn't tie up the loose ends or explain exactly what happened. Presumably it's not important.

The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of Murakami short stories. They all have his unmistakable tone and style.

Some of them have the same frustrating ending. A few are more traditional and wrap up nicely.

Despite the frustrations, I did enjoy the book immensely and have no problem recommending it. Just be prepared for more deliberate loose ends than a pair of leather pants with fringe.

One thing that is fairly common in Murakami's novels is that characters are very accepting of their situation. They don't question things, but drift with the current and do what they're supposed to do. This passage is the epitome of Murakami:

Stretched out in the back seat, long and stiff as a dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun. Its shells rustled dryly in the pocket of my wife's windbreaker. We had two black ski masks in the glove compartment. Why my wife owned a shotgun, I have no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain, and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt.

Page 44

The book is filled with lines like that. And lines like that are why I keep reading Murakami books.

As I put this review together, and as I thought more about the stories, Murakami's main theme became clear. It became clear in a way that may not be evident from individual stories. The last story in the book, the one the title comes from, is the pure essence of Murakami. If you want to see what he writes about, you can start there.

Murakami is writing about loneliness. His characters are alone, some through loss, some through poor choices, and most because that is the way they are. They can have a family, friends, and coworkers, and still be completely alone.

They characters throughout these stories are looking for a genuine heart-to-heart connection with someone or something in this world. And often, they can't quite find it.

The characters all exist apart from the rest of the world. Many of them seem normal enough, but they are all damaged in some way. And that makes them different.

Unlike many authors, though, Murakami doesn't seem to say that this happens to everyone. He's not telling the reader that everyone feels this way. His main characters all have this in common, and that makes them extraordinary and special. And rarely do they get to experience true happiness.

This collection offers 17 short versions of what readers can expect from Murakami's novels. All the themes - solitude, disconnectedness and estrangement - are present, and behind the seeming simplicity of the writing lies, indeed, a depth of some sort. Murakami is a master of seizing the visceral details of small moments, and there are many occasions when the reader will recognize himself in what the protagonist is going through emotionally.

In these stories (as in his novels, for that matter), the author does not tackle the "big issues" that most "serious" authors are so often concerned with. Instead, Murakami zooms in on the single, simple man and woman lost in the crowd, and the grand sweeping themes (think Tolstoy, Mann, Mishima, etc) are for the most part absent. The topic of individuality may indeed prove challenging to audiences who, for cultural reasons, have not traditionally been offered literary servings of this kind. Readers who are accustomed to the tradition of individualism, however, will still find something to connect with in these stories.

All in all, this is highly-recommended as an introduction to Murakami. If readers enjoy the style in this collection, they will enjoy the novels, too.

Perhaps it is because this is a compilation of earlier works, or perhaps because the scope of short stories is limiting, I found myself a little disappointed with this book. While I am without a doubt a Murakami fan (I absolutely loved A Wild Sheep Chase; Dance, Dance, Dance; Hardboiled Wonderland; and Kafka on the Shore), I found the stories here lacked the complexity that I have come to enjoy from Murakami. I did enjoy some of the stories here, but, over all, I found the book a little lacking in depth.

A fabulous, if a bit uneven collection of stories from one of the modern masters of fiction. The first story, "The Wind-Up Bird..." is the first chapter from his spectacular novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles." All the characters in these stories are vaguely cynical, listless inhabitants of postmodern Tokyo - the city, as well as its people, are cosmopolitan and hyper-westernized, and many of the stories deal with discomforting lack of certainty and stability of the existence in such a world. People disappear, monsters plead for love, and real people act/talk as though they were characters in jaded fables. You might think Murakami's doing a version of magic realism, but he's more sly than that: no matter how fabulous events seem to be, the characters, the exacting details of the events, the dead-on metaphors/themes ground all the stories firmly to reality. The stories are a blast to read as well. When a hungry couple pulls a heist of a McDonald's and steal 20 big-macs, they politely pay for their two drinks and walk out. ("Bakery Attack") Trust me. You have to read it.

The Elephant Vanishes is a grand collection of short stories from Haruki Murakami. They vary in length, from a few pages to 30+ pages, but they all bear the Murakamiesque stamps of eerieness, humor, and compassion.

In the title story, an elephant vanishes from a public enclosure, as does his keeper. It seems like a simple mistake; couldn't his keeper have just stolen him, and left town? Couldn't the elephant have run away, and the keeper is just searching for him? (these occur to the reader, but they're not offered by the narrator or a character...) But towards the end of the story, our narrator offers us a few bizarre details. Yes, the elephant vanished all right. And he knows it vanished. Murakami's description of this is amazing.

Other stories involve a late night robbery of a fast food restaurant (of food, not money), a man on the last day of his lawn-mowing job, and a woman who witnesses a small green monster emerge from the soil of her front yard.

One of my favorites involves a woman who has gone weeks without sleep. She reads Anna Karenina at night. During the days, she lives as she always did, and her husband and son are oblivious to her insomnia. A very strange fate befalls her.

If you've read some of Murakami's novels, but you haven't read THE ELEPANT VANISHES, you owe it to yourself to give this book a chance. The stories are just great. If you haven't yet read Haruki Murakami, this collection is actually a pretty good place to start.

ken32

Americans seem to be fascinated by the culture of Japan. We wonder endlessly about a group of islands that can produce things as diverse as Noh drama, zen gardens and Nintendo games. American writers, too, can't seem to get enough of Japan, e.g., Jay McInerney, John Burnham Schwartz and Michael Crichton.

Haruki Murakami, one of the most original and brilliant authors writing today, gives us an entirely different look at life in Japan in his collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes. These stories show us Japan "from the inside." What might seem exotic to both Americans and Europeans, such as oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks, becomes, in these stories, the stuff of everyday life. In fact, Haruki Marakami's Japan could be "anyplace," and one has to read eleven pages into this collection before the first reference to Japan is ever made.

In The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami's narrators are as much "Everyman" as are the narrators of his novels. They are young, urban and charmingly downwardly mobile. And, they are more likely to eat a plate of spaghetti than soba noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock but eschew Japanese rock music. They read Len Deighton and War and Peace rather than Kobo Abe and The Tale of the Genji. They are Japanese, to be sure, but all their points of reference seem to be exclusively Western and signature Murakami.

In the world of Haruki Murakami, bizarre events take place with striking regularity and, also with strikingly regularity, they are accepted as simply the stuff of everyday life. In The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women, the narrator's search for a missing cat leads him to a closed-off and neglected alleyway passing between the backyards of parallel houses. Here, he encounters a sunbathing teenage girl who mimics the alleyway in that she is both ordinary and alien.

In A Window, a correspondence school writing teacher pays a visit to a pupil, a married woman in her early thirties. They spend their time eating hamburgers and listening to Burt Bacharach. Nothing much happens; in fact, the thing the narrator remembers most is the lovely weather and the colorful array of sheets and futons drying over the railings of the building's verandahs. Like many of Murakami's protagonists, what these two share is absent more than it is present.

Many of these stories seem more than a little fabulistic. The Dancing Dwarf is a good example. This story takes place in an impressively efficient factory that manufactures, of all things, elephants. The protagonist just happens to be assigned to the ear section during his narration of the story, working in that part of the building with the yellow ceiling and the yellow posts. His helmet and pants also happen to be yellow. The month before, however, he had been assigned to the green building and he had worn a green helmet and green pants and had made heads.

TV People is a bizarre story that involves human mutants reduced by twenty to thirty percent, something that made them look far away even when close up. When these mutants invade both the narrator's home and office and begin to deny his very existence, he begins to doubt it as well.

And, in The Elephant Vanishes, the haunting title story, an elephant actually disappears, with its keeper, from an enclosure where it has been kept as a mascot for a Tokyo suburb. The solution to the mystery, like all of Murakami's mysteries is not clear cut but hinges on a matter of perspective and proportion instead.

Parallel worlds abound in these stories; this is ordinary life, but ordinary life fraught with unexpected and unsettling views. In the stories that make up The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami is doing what he does so wonderfully: pointing out how much of life is hidden beneath the surface, how much is truly unknowable.

In Sleep, a young woman suddenly finds she no longer needs it. Rather than question her sudden awakening, she focuses instead on the strangeness of her husband's face. Unable to describe exactly why it now seems so strange to her, she simply accepts that it is weird and that is that. The protagonist of The Second Bakery Attack is similar in that he really doesn't question why his wife keeps a shotgun and ski masks in their car, even though neither of them had ever skied.

Lest anyone think these stories gloss over life, they couldn't be more wrong. Detail abounds: the pull tabs from beer cans lying in overflowing ashtrays, shotgun shells that rustle like the buckwheat husks in old-fashioned pillows, ice melting in cocktail glasses.

Like kittens lolling all over one another, a metaphor from a story entitled The Last Lawn of the Afternoon, these are stories in which animals--elephants, kangaroos, windup birds, and even the tragically mistreated "little green monsters"--play an extraordinarily prominent part. The Elephant Vanishes is definitely the world of Haruki Murakami, ordinary and yet so very, very extraordinary.

An untouchable mystery of thought, madness, and equally unexplained sadness -- such is the gloomy psychological landscape in which Murakami typically sets his intriguing narratives. All those deliciously subcutaneous elements of prose are as evident in this collection of over a dozen stories as in any of his longer novels.

Geographically, many of them are based in Tokyo, but it might be any of the world's vast unforgiving cities where people get lost like tears in the rain and finding love is sometimes as hard as solving Rubik's cube in the dark. Reading Murakami is an unsettling, disorienting experience that can leave you feeling rather empty, but always somehow thoughtful.

Minor gripe: my favorite translator of Murakami's work is Jay Rubin and I am certain that under his watchful pen the stories would have more closely resembled the verve of their originals (in Japanese).

Nonetheless, if you have never read Murakami before, this marvellous collection is a great way to start in manageable dollops of his style. And if you are familiar with the author's dour tracts, this book should be an unmissable little something to relish on a sunny Sunday afternoon.