The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

The prevailing emotion of this story is loneliness. The narrator’s “100% perfect girl” hardly feels like a real person so much as a manifestation of his desire for a companion—characteristic behavior for Murakami’s male narrators in this collection. He hardly remembers anything concrete about her, only that “she was no great beauty. It’s weird” (69). Most of the story, in fact, takes place in the narrator’s mind, emphasizing the collection’s exploration of Internality and Social Relationships. The titular event itself is nothing more than a blink: The narrator passes by the girl in April, and the two go their separate ways. Afterward, the narrator thinks of what he should have said to her, finally settling on a mournful story about regret and lost love.

The narrator’s fantasy imagines a past for the narrator as well as the girl, in which they met once before and realized that they were 100% perfect for each other, reinforcing the idea that for the narrator, the girl is not a person in her own right but rather a place for the narrator to project his own longing. In the story, as in real life, the narrator second-guesses himself, suggesting that he and the girl test themselves by parting ways to see if they meet again, reasoning that this is the only way to confirm that they are really “each other’s 100% perfect lovers” (71). The memory loss of both the boy and the girl in the narrator’s fantasy undermines this test: Memory, like perception, proves to be flawed and unreliable.

The narrator’s need to create a fanciful past for himself and the girl becomes self-protective, allowing him to retain the belief that there is someone 100% perfect for him, without having to act on or investigate that belief and have it disproven. Significantly, the narrator’s imagined story of the boy and the girl serves as his only past: No other autobiographical information is given in the story. While the story is no doubt a figment of his imagination (even if it were true, it would be impossible for him to know that it was true, given the memory loss experienced by the boy in the story), it highlights his desire to believe that there does exist somewhere a girl who is 100% perfect for him, and dispel his growing conviction that this belief cannot stand up to the cold light of reality. Indeed, even when the narrator decides what he should have said to the girl, he admits that the speech would have been “far too long for [him] to have delivered it properly,” commenting that “[t]he ideas [he] come[s] up with are never very practical” (70). The narrator thus assumes a resigned and passive stance toward his social relationships, suggesting that, for him, fantasies are safer and require less of him than the pursuit of actual, imperfect connections and the work required to maintain them.