HARUKI MURAKAMI / THE ELEPHANT VANISHES

HARUKI MURAKAMI / THE ELEPHANT VANISHES

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In "THE ELEPHANT VANISHES", Murakami intermingles reality with fantasy, memory with illusion, and the physical world with metaphysical contemplation. Murakami’s characters are homemakers, store clerks, para-professionals, business people, and college students. Many of them suffer from the modern syndrome of angst, ennui, emptiness, and loneliness. These characters’ ontological relationship with reality, therefore, appears to be defined by their ability to create unreality. In “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” for instance, the unemployed narrator’s search for a cat leads him to a meeting with a high school girl whose soothing voice puts the narrator to “sleep”; the meeting is as real as imaginary. “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” examines the paradoxical relationship between fiction and memory. The narrator wants to shape his memory the same way he mows lawns, for he knows both involve deliberate and highly subjective choices. In “The Kangaroo Communique,” the narrator is a bored store clerk. He finds in the theory of the Nobility of Imperfection both an answer to a customer’s complaint and an excuse to console himself. Murakami’s use of surrealism in "THE ELEPHANT VANISHES" is very effective. It bridges the parallel worlds of the visible and the invisible. By making comprehensible what otherwise seems incongruous, Murakami is able to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Murakami’s stories are also enlivened with humour and his characters’ professed candor and innocence.