The Elephant Vanishes

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.

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.

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 pe

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'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.