The Elephant Vanishes: Stories - Hardcover

Murakami, Haruki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679420576 ISBN 13: 9780679420576

Publisher: Knopf, 1993

Synopsis

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Reviews

A popular Japanese novelist who lives in New Jersey but sets his fictions in Japan, Murakami ( A Wild Sheep Chase ) invests everyday events with surreal overtones to create 17 disturbing existential conundrums. Things appear from, and disappear to, alternate levels of reality with frightening ease: A man glimpses an elephant shrinking, and its keeper growing, shortly before the animal vanishes from a suburban Tokyo zoo; a woman tortures a little green monster who crawls out of her garden to propose marriage; while another man watches impassively as three silent, tiny strangers--"TV People"--invade his house, install a TV set and take over his life. Even more strictly earthbound stories have the quality of modern fables, as when a newlywed couple hold up a McDonald's to break the curse that gives them late-night hunger attacks, or when an out-of-work paralegal copes with his angry wife, a flirtatious teenage neighbor and an anonymous woman phone caller who seems to know everything about him. In both his playful throwaway sketches and his darkly comic masterpieces, Murakami has proven himself a virtuoso with a fertile imagination.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A seamless melding of Japanese cultural nuances with universal themes--in a virtuoso story collection from rising literary star Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1991). These 15 pieces, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy, are narrated by different characters who nonetheless share similar sensibilities and attitudes. At home within their own urban culture, they happily pick and choose from Western cultural artifacts as varied as Mozart tapes, spaghetti dinners, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts in a terrain not so much surreal as subtly out of kilter, and haunted by the big questions of death, courage, and love. In the title story, the narrator--who does p.r. for a kitchen-appliance maker and who feels that ``things around [him] have lost their balance,'' that a ``pragmatic approach'' helps avoid complicated problems--is troubled by the inexplicable disappearance of a local elephant and his keeper. In another notable story, ``Sleep,'' a young mother, unable to sleep, begins to question not only her marriage and her affection for her child, but death itself, which may mean ``being eternally awake and staring into darkness.'' Stories like ``TV People,'' in which a man's apartment is taken over by TV characters who ``look as if they were reduced by photocopy, everything mechanically calibrated''; ``Barn Burning,'' in which a man confesses to burning barns (it helps him keep his sense of moral balance); and ``The Second Bakery Attack,'' in which a young married couple rob a McDonald's of 30 Big Macs in order to exorcise the sense of a ``weird presence'' in their lives--all exemplify Murakami's sense of the fragility of the ordinary world. Remarkable evocations of a postmodernist world, superficially indifferent but transformed by Murakami's talent into a place suffused with a yearning for meaning. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This collection of 15 stories from a popular Japanese writer, perhaps best known in this country for A Wild Sheep Chase ( LJ 11/15/89), gives a nice idea of his breadth of style. The work maintains the matter-of-fact tone reminiscent of American detective fiction, balancing itself somewhere between the spare realism of Raymond Carver and the surrealism of Kobo Abe. These are not the sort of stories that one thinks of as "Japanese"; the intentionally Westernized style and well-placed reference to pop culture gives them a contemporary and universal feel. Engaging, thought-provoking, humorous, and slyly profound, these skillful stories will easily appeal to American readers but must present something of a challenge to the Japanese cultural establishment. At their best, however, they serve to dispel cultural stereotypes and reveal a common humanity. Recommended for libraries with an interest in contemporary fiction.
- Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from "The Wind-up Bird And Tuesday's Women"

I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini's La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.

I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It's almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo. Still, on second thought, I figure I might as well turn down the flame and head into the living room, cooking chopsticks in hand, to pick up the receiver. It might be a friend, it occurs to me, possibly with word of a new job.

"I want ten minutes of your time," comes a woman's voice out of the blue.

"Excuse me?" I blurt back in surprise. "How's that again?"

"I said, just ten minutes of your time, that's all I want," the woman repeats.

I have absolutely no recollection of ever hearing this woman's voice before. And I pride myself on a near-perfect ear for voices, so I'm sure there's no mistake. This is the voice of a woman I don't know. A soft, low, nondescript voice.

"Pardon me, but what number might you have been calling?" I put on my most polite language.

"What difference does that make? All I want is ten minutes of your time. Ten minutes to come to an understanding." She cinches the matter quick and neat.

"Come to an understanding?"

"Of our feelings," says the woman succinctly.

I crane my neck back through the door I've left open to peer into the kitchen. A plume of white steam rising cheerfully from the spaghetti pot, and Abbado is still conducting his Gazza.

"If you don't mind, I've got spaghetti on right now. It's almost done, and it'll be ruined if I talk with you for ten minutes. So I'm going to hang up, all right?"

"Spaghetti?" the woman sputters in disbelief. "It's only ten-thirty in the morning. What are you doing cooking spaghetti at ten-thirty in the morning? Kind of strange, don't you think?"

"Strange or not, what's it to you?" I say. "I hardly had any breakfast, so I was getting hungry right about now. And as long as I do the cooking, when and what I eat is my own business, is it not?"

"Well, whatever you say. Hang up, then," says the woman in a slow, sappy trickle of a voice. A peculiar voice. The slightest emotional shift and her tone switches to another frequency. "I'll call back later."

"Now, wait just one minute," I stammer. "If you're selling something, you can forget right now about calling back. I'm unemployed at present and can't afford to buy anything."

"I know that, so don't give it another thought," says the woman.

"You know that? You know what?"

"That you're unemployed, of course. That much I knew. So cook your spaghetti and let's get on with it, okay?"

"Hey, who the--" I launch forth, when suddenly the phone goes dead. Cut me off. Too abruptly to have set down the receiver; she must have pressed the button with her finger.

I'm left hanging. I stare blankly at the receiver in my hand and only then remember the spaghetti. I put down the receiver and return to the kitchen. Turn off the gas, empty the spaghetti into a colander, top it with tomato sauce I've heated in a saucepan, then eat. It's overcooked, thanks to that pointless telephone call. No matter of life-and-death, nor am I in any mood to fuss over the subtleties of cooking spaghetti--I'm too hungry. I simply listen to the radio playing send-off music for two hundred fifty grams of spaghetti as I eagerly dispatch every last strand to my stomach. I wash up plate and pans while boiling a kettle of water, then pour a cup for a tea bag. As I drink my tea, I think about that phone call.

So we could come to an understanding?

What on earth did that woman mean, calling me up like that? And who on earth was she?

The whole thing is a mystery. I can't recall any woman ever telephoning me before without identifying herself, nor do I have the slightest clue what she could have wanted to talk about.

What the hell, I tell myself, what do I care about understanding some strange woman's feelings, anyway? What possible good could come of it? What matters now is that I find a job. Then I can settle into a new life cycle.

Yet even as I return to the sofa to resume the Len Deighton novel I took out of the library, the mere glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the telephone sets my mind going. Just what were those feelings that would take ten minutes to come to an understanding about? I mean, really, ten minutes to come to an understanding of our feelings?

Come to think of it, the woman specified precisely ten minutes right from the start. Seems she was quite certain about that exact amount of time. As if nine minutes would have been too short, eleven minutes maybe too long. Just like for spaghetti al dente.

What with these thoughts running through my head, I lose track of the plot of the novel. So I decide to do a few quick exercises, perhaps iron a shirt or two. Whenever things get in a muddle, I always iron shirts. A habit of long standing with me.

I divide the shirt-ironing process into twelve steps total: from (1) Collar <Front>, to (12) <Left Sleeve>. Absolutely no deviation from that order. One by one, I could off the steps. The ironing doesn't go right if I don't.

So there I am, ironing my third shirt, enjoying the hiss of the steam iron and the distinctive smell of hot cotton, checking for wrinkles before hanging up each shirt in the wardrobe. I switch off the iron and put it away in the closet with the ironing board.

I'm getting thirsty by now and am heading to the kitchen for some water when once more the telephone rings. Here we go again, I think. And for a moment I wonder whether I shouldn't just ignore it and keep on going into the kitchen. But you never know, so I retrace my steps back to the living room and pick up the receiver. If it's that woman again, I'll say I'm in the middle of ironing and hang up.

The call, however, is from my wife. By the clock atop the TV, it's eleven-thirty.

"How're things?" she asks.

"Fine," I answer, relieved.

"What've you been up to?"

"Ironing."

"Is anything wrong?" my wife asks. A slight tension invades her voice. She knows all about my ironing when I'm unsettled.

"Nothing at all. I just felt like ironing some shirts. No particular reason," I say, switching the receiver from right hand to left as I sit down on a chair. "So, is there something you wanted to tell me about?"

"Yes, it's about work. There's the possibility of a job."

"Uh-huh," I say.

"Can you write poetry?"

"Poetry?" I shoot back in surprise. What's this about poetry?

"A magazine company where someone I know works puts out this popular fiction monthly for young girls and they're looking for someone to select and brush up poetry submissions. Then they want one leadoff poem each month for the section. The work's easy and the pay's not bad. Of course it's only part-time, but if things go well they might string you on for editorial work and--"

"Easy?" I say. "Now hold on just one minute. I've been looking for a position with a law firm. Just where do you come up with this brushing up of poetry?"

"Well, didn't you say you used to do some writing in high school?"

"In a newspaper. The high-school newspaper. Such-and-such team won the soccer meet; the physics teacher fell down the stairs and had to go to the hospital. Dumb little articles like that I wrote. Not poetry. I can't write poetry."

"Not real poetry, just the kind of poems high-school girls might read. They don't even have to be that good. It's not like they're expecting you to write like Allen Ginsberg. Just whatever you can make do."

"I absolutely cannot write make-do poetry," I snap. The very idea.

"Hmph," pouts my wife. "This talk of legal work, though. Nothing seems to be materializing, does it?"

"Several prospects have come my way already. The final word'll be in sometime this week. If those fall through, maybe then I'll consider it."

"Oh? Have it your way, then. But say, what day is it today?"

"Tuesday," I tell her after a moment's thought.

"Okay, then, could you stop by the bank and pay the gas and phone bills?"

"Sure thing. I was going out to shop for dinner soon, anyway. I can take care of it at the same time."

"And what are we having for dinner?"

"Hmm, let's see," I say. "Haven't made up my mind yet. I thought I'd decide when I go shopping."

"You know," my wife starts in with a new tone of voice, "I've been thinking. Maybe you don't really need to be looking for work."

"And why not?" I spit out. Yet more surprises? Is every woman in the world out to shake me up over the phone? "Why don't I have to be looking for work? Another three months and my unemployment compensation is due to run out. No time for idle hands."

"My salary's gone up, and my side job is going well, not to mention we have plenty in savings. So if we don't go overboard on luxuries, we should be able to keep food on the table."

"And I'd do the housework?"

"Is that so bad?"

"I d...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679420576
• ISBN 13: 9780679420576
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 327