The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

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Themes

Existential Anxiety in the Modern World

Existential anxiety colors the worlds of the short stories collected in The Elephant Vanishes, touching the lives of each narrator regardless of age or background, suggesting that the experience of such anxiety is simultaneously universal and highly individual. The narrator of “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” in particular goes through life in a kind of existential haze, noting that “[s]omewhere, in my head, in my body, in my very existence, it’s as if there were some long-lost subterranean element that’s been skewing my life ever so slightly off” (14). The narrator of “The Elephant Vanishes,” similarly, claims to feel that “things around [him] have lost their proper balance” (327) after the disappearance (or vanishing) of the elephant and his keeper.

In other stories, the dissatisfaction with existence runs deeper, as in “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” where the narrator wants only “to be able to be in two places at once” (64). Even the younger characters of Murakami’s stories are plagued by anxieties about their existence and mortality. The teenage girl the narrator meets in “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” cannot stop thinking about death, indicating that there is a fine line between anxiety and dread in a modern world where even children cannot escape the subject of death.

In some of the stories, existential anxiety gives way to a kind of fatalism. The narrator of “The Second Bakery Attack,” for example, professes the position that “we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not” (36). Other narrators and characters translate their existential speculations into a search for meaning. The narrator of “The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds” finds meaning in an act as simple as maintaining his diary. For the boyfriend in “Barn Burning,” “[a] person can’t exist without morals” (142), and burning burns thus becomes an aspect of the boyfriend’s morality. In “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Day,” the narrator finds a sense of meaning by believing that there exists a girl who is 100% perfect for him (even if he cannot bring himself to act on this belief or even to talk to this girl when he thinks he sees her).

The narrator of “Sleep” is a more complex case. She is bored with her life as a wife and mother and finds meaning in taking care of her body, but she also, as she stops sleeping, finds meaning in the focus and concentration she uses when she is by herself. To her, “the power to concentrate [is] the most important thing” (100), and she views her new state, consequently, as an expansion of her existence.

Perception Versus Reality

Perception and its often touch-and-go relationship to reality is a prevalent theme in Murakami’s stories as the narrators interrogate and struggle to define the nature of reality itself. Perception and reality often clash, as is demonstrated by the uneven manner in which many of Murakami’s narrators remember their past. The narrator of “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” even remarks that:

Memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t even there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable (269).

Similarly, the narrator of “A Slow Boat to China” notes that his memory is often:

[I]mpressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory anymore? (219).

In many of Murakami’s stories, the struggle to delineate between perception and reality reinforces the Existential Anxiety in the Modern World that so many of the stories’ characters experience. Several narrators are confronted with the feeling of losing their reality. The narrator of “Barn Burning” experiences the “unnerving” feeling of his reality being “siphoned away” (134) when he sees his friend demonstrating her skills as an amateur mime. In “TV People,” the narrator’s encounter with the hallucinogenic TV People of the title makes him doubt his own existence (202).

And yet, despite this apparent gulf between perception and reality, Murakami raises a sense that we also create our own realities through our perceptions and experiences of it. The narrator of “A Window” remarks that “I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make. It is this that gives birth to meaning” (191). In many of the stories, reality is what the narrator’s perception makes of it. For the narrator of “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” plagued by his existential anxiety and thoughts of his mortality, reality becomes “a regular wind-up toy world” (31). For the narrator of “Sleep,” on the other hand, the “most important thing” (82) about reality is its simultaneity—the fact that the narrator exists in the present (“simultaneity” also features in the existential speculations of other narrators and characters of the stories, such as the boyfriend in “Barn Burning”). Reality can be difficult to define, but it can also be simple, a matter of doing the “same thing, over and over” (134). In the end, Murakami suggests, there is no one reality: Reality is individual, created by each individual, the product of their perceptions, memories, and experiences.

Internality and Social Relationships

Murakami’s stories explore the internality and isolation that impact social relationships. Many of Murakami’s narrators and characters are isolated figures with a longing for social connection. The narrator of “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Day” expresses this longing for social connection through his belief that there exists a girl who is 100% perfect for him. At the same time, this longing for social connection is belied by the deeply-ingrained internality and isolation of the narrator, who forgoes an actual conversation with his “100% perfect girl” in favor of an internal monologue he invents to represent what he should have said to her (but which he did not say when he passed her and which he now never can say).

A similar oscillation between internality and a longing for social connection features prominently in many of Murakami’s other stories as well. The narrator of “The Elephant Vanishes,” for example, is drawn to the magazine editor but stops seeing her because he cannot shake a feeling that something inside of him is internally out of balance. The narrator of “Barn Burning” pursues a friendly relationship with a girl much younger than him, even though he is already married. The narrator of “The Kangaroo Communiqué” reaches out to a woman who sent a complaint to the department store where he works, even as he meditates on the imperfection that necessarily accompanies all social relationships. In the rambling letter of “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” forgiveness—the foundation of the “Nobility of Imperfection”—becomes essential to any social relationship. Because humans are inherently imperfect, “The Kangaroo Communiqué” narrator believes that learning to forgive each other is the only way to realize true connection—an idea that Murakami uses to provide insight on people’s failure to communicate effectively and understand each other—a failure illustrated in many of the collection’s stories.

The narrators’ collective tendency to default to their own internality emphasizes the inherent imperfection of human communication, resulting in feelings of isolation. In “Family Affair,” the narrator’s isolation stems from his inability to understand (or accept) that his sister wants to live her life very differently from him. In “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” the narrator cannot understand his wife’s frustration with their relationship at the end of the story, just as she cannot understand his existential dissatisfaction. In “TV People,” the narrator is doomed to isolation by the fact that the eponymous TV People are visible to him alone and cannot be described effectively to the other people in his life.

Even when communication is perfectly streamlined, as it is between the narrator of “The Little Green Monster” and the mind-reading monster, people get in their own way, driving away those who reach out to them for social connection and thus remaining isolated. The narrator of “Sleep,” similarly, feels isolated in her relationship to her family because nobody notices her sleepless state, consequently concluding that her condition “is something [she has] to deal with [herself]” (76). Even when they are seemingly content with their social relationships, the internalizing and introspective narrators and characters of Murakami’s stories tend to remain isolated, trapped in the prison of their own minds.