The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

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“The Silence”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Silence” Summary

While waiting for a plane at the airport, the narrator asks his business friend Ozawa, an amateur boxer, if he has ever punched somebody. Ozawa finally admits that he did hit somebody in eighth grade, soon after he had started boxing. Though he wishes he could “wipe the story out of [his] mind entirely” (295), he tells the narrator about his fight and its far-reaching consequences.

The boy Ozawa hit was a classmate named Aoki. Aoki was a model student who was extremely popular, though Ozawa never liked him. When Ozawa earned the top score on one English test in eighth grade, however, Aoki became jealous and accused him of cheating. Ozawa confronted Aoki about this and finally punched him in the jaw. This led Aoki to hate and resent Ozawa throughout high school. Meanwhile, Ozawa began boxing at his uncle’s gym.

A few years later, during their final year of high school, a student named Matsumoto ended his life. A police investigation uncovered that Matsumoto had been bullied by his classmates, though the identities of the bullies was unknown. Ozawa was soon suspected of bullying Matsumoto, apparently because of his boxing background and because he had once hit Aoki; Ozawa believes that Aoki himself spread the rumor. Though the police and school administration finally cleared Ozawa, he was still ignored by his fellow students, and none of his classmates spoke to him until the end of high school. Ozawa became depressed at first, but after one encounter with Aoki on a train, he learned to pity him and hold his head high until the end of the school year.

Ozawa confesses that people like Aoki, who are simple opportunists, do not bother him. Rather, it is people’s willingness to believe the lies of such opportunists that really disappoints him. Even now, years later, the silence of his classmates continues to haunt Ozawa.

“The Silence” Analysis

“The Silence” explores human isolation and the failure to understand one another. Ozawa, the man who tells the story to the narrator, explains that he has always been the silent and solitary type. Indeed, part of what drew Ozawa to boxing in the first place was the fact that boxing is “an extremely solitary pursuit” (294). Ozawa’s experiences also teach him that loneliness is not always a bad thing—though it can be a bad thing, as his story shows:

There’s all different kinds of loneliness. There’s the tragic loneliness that tears at your nerves with pain. And then there’s the loneliness that isn’t like that at all—though in order to reach that point, you’ve got to pare your body down. If you make the effort, you get back what you put in (294-95).

When Ozawa is ostracized by his classmates because of the unfounded rumor that he had bullied Matsumoto, he experiences the first kind of “tragic” loneliness. The silence of his classmates affects Ozawa deeply, and even though he has always seen himself as isolated, the complete absence of any social connection causes him to become depressed:

Day after day, a vacuum. After two or three weeks of this, I lost my appetite. I lost weight. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d lie there, all worked up, my head filled with this endless succession of ugly images. And when I was awake, my mind was like a fog. I wasn’t sure if I was awake or asleep (302).

Throughout the collection, Murakami evokes various types of sound to represent an attempt at or a desire for human connection and understanding. In “The Silence,” he employs the absence of sound to emphasize the pain of Ozawa’s isolation. What Ozawa says bothered him most of all about his isolation was not the fact that Aoki lied. Rather, it was the fact that all of his classmates ostracized him with silence that tortured him. As Ozawa tells the narrator, “what really scares me is how easily, how uncritically, people will believe the crap that slime like Aoki deal out. […] Them. They’re the real monsters. They’re the ones I have nightmares about” (306).