The elephant vanishes : stories

by Haruki Murakami

Paperback, 1994

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Vintage Books, 1994.

Description

Contains seventeen short fiction stories by Haruki Murakami about people whose lives veer off the path of normalcy.

Media reviews

Det är en ojämn samling, pärlor och bagateller om vartannat. När Murakami är som sämst är han tomt idisslande. När han är som bäst tar han sig in i ens huvud.
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Murakamis uppsluppna kombination av noir och fantasy är svårartat beroendeframkallande.

User reviews

LibraryThing member tundranocaps
All over the scale in terms of moods and themes, the quality often suffers.
LibraryThing member jhybe
best collection of short stories, including "The 100% perfect girl", which is arguably a 100% most charming short story ever.
LibraryThing member chrisblocker
I've had a tough time putting my finger on my feelings about Murakami and his writing. Before investing in this collection of short stories, I've read two of the author's more celebrated works, as well as the author's terse answers for The Secret Miracle project. I'm still not convinced of
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Murakami's brilliance. While reading his stories, I often feel underwhelmed. The story can be incredibly dry, but given some magical element and a cat, it is supposed to be transformed into writing of the highest quality. The characters are often the same: young men, stuck in a tedious work, with a great love for breasts and refrigerators. Seriously, take my word for it non-Murakami readers, there is a lot of time spent in the kitchen. And yet...

And yet I cannot shake these stories. There are novels I gave five shinning stars to, but five years later, I have only the vaguest memories of their plot. It's been six years since I read my first Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, and I still remember so many details. Every week or two, an image from that novel comes back to me. I gave the book an embarrassing three-star rating, yet there are few books I've read since that I think of as much as that one. It's powerful, and yet, I'm still underwhelmed.

I heard some years back that all fiction readers can be divided into three categories: those who read for plot, those who read for character, and those who read for language. Now, a reader can span multiple categories, but most readers are going to fall primarily into one or another. A plot-driven reader can forgive sloppy characterization if the story is well told. Myself, I'm character primarily, language secondarily. A story without a well-built character, no matter how amazing the plot, is going to fall flat for me.

So here I am, analyzing my feelings regarding Murakami, trying to figure out how his writing fits into these categories—and I'm not sure they do. His characters certainly aren't carrying the stories. The language, or I should say the English translation, is nothing beautiful or unique. One could argue the plot is the central focus, as it is the strongest of the three, but I'm now noticing there is a fourth force that may be at play here: imagery. Are there books where imagery is the primary element? Then there must be readers who are image-driven readers, right? With its little people, magical flutes, elephant factories, and perfectly round breasts, breasts, breasts, Murakami's stories make a strong argument for the image-centric novel. It makes sense that Murakami would appeal so much to a visual generation that grew up with video games, comic books, and 32 television channels.

The stories in The Elephant Vanishes are most significant when they tap Murakami's talent of the visual. Murakami is skilled at taking two seemingly random elements and making a story out of them. The more visual these elements are, the more successfully they breathe life into the story. These are unforgettable moments. There are many stories in The Elephant Vanishes that fail to do this, in my opinion. Much like nearly every collection of short stories I've read, there are great stories and there are mediocre stories; despite its gems, The Elephant Vanishes is bogged down by quite a few less-than-memorable tales. As a whole, the collection is rather average.

So I walk away from Murakami again feeling underwhelmed. Despite this feeling, I already know there are images from this collection that I won't be able to shake: factories where elephants are manufactured, a dancing dwarf who comes in dream, a young couple donning the mask of the Hamburglar. In time, I'll return to the author, keeping in mind what I learned this go around: despite working in the medium of words, Murakami is in some regards a visual artist.
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LibraryThing member grizzly.anderson
The short story seems to be a lost or dying art, perhaps because there are not so many outlets for them any more. Or perhaps because I just don't know where to look. In any case I was happy to find a collection of Murakami's short stories. I like his novels, but sometimes I end up feeling wrung out
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and lost by the time I'm done with them. Some of the short stories are just as confusing, but they are quickly done. And he is such a good writer that the ones that click can be re-read many times. (The Fall of the Roman Empire... and Barn Burning respectively)

Many of the stories fall into the contemporary/urban fantasy category his novels typically inhabit (TV People, The Little Green Monster), but some of them are timeless/placeless character studies full of the rich interior monologue that Murakami does so well (The Last Lawn of the Afternoon).

There are also pieces that are taken from, or are stepping stones to his novels, such as the opening story The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women, which is pretty much the opening chapters of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Others, like The Dancing Dwarf feel like they were taken from fairy tales (maybe The Red Shoes and Cinderella, or something specifically Japanese) and given a Murakami twist (a factory that *makes elephants*?)

Sometimes a name will come up repeatedly, like Noboru Watanabe, but applied to such different characters that they can't actually be the same person & Murakami is just playing with the name and who it might be. That or connections are far deeper and more subtle than I can fathom.

All in all, a nice collection with more good than bad. And the beauty of short bad stories is that the end and a new beginning is not far off.
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LibraryThing member llasram
I'm glad I read this collection, but I only really loved a few of the stories in it. The collection overall just felt uneven to me, a sense furthered by the way it combines the work of two different translators. Of the two (Rubin and Birnbaum), I definitely preferred Rubin's translations -- or
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maybe just preferred the stories he chose to translate. The stories I did love though -- "Sleep" and the title story in particular -- have something really powerful about them, a quiet unhinging of the world that Murakami makes seem both plausible and fundamentally disquieting.
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LibraryThing member g026r
As much as I enjoy Murakami, I find his short-story collections to be a bit difficult to read as the sameness of many of his protagonists becomes apparent when they exist in such close confines to each other. (Man in his 30s, possibly a writer, who enjoys classical and/or jazz and European cuisine
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-- though admittedly he'll sometimes change things up by making it a woman in her 30s, possibly a writer, who enjoys &c. &c..)

Overall, I found this volume a bit better in that regards than Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, in that there was a larger variety of protagonists present. (Or, at least, a larger variety of settings, which may have made otherwise similar protagonists seem more dissimilar than otherwise.) However, I still have to say that I enjoy his novels more than I do his short stories.
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LibraryThing member cameling
Murakami is a master of dark comedy and surreal stories. These are 15 short stories of dark humor. I think my favorite of them is 'The Kangaroo Communique' - where a store's product manager takes it upon himself to write a letter and then scrapes that idea to record a tape of his thoughts to a
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customer who had written a letter of complaint to the store because they didn't allow her to exchange an LP she had bought a week before. I loved this story because the product manager, with his rambling thoughts that just seemed to jump from one thing to another so reminded me of myself.

All the stories are rather playful or thought provoking.
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LibraryThing member Tinwara
Not being that much of a short story reader, but being a hardcore Murakami fan, I wondered what would carry more weight: the short stories or Murakami.

Turns out that even if Murakami writes them, short stories are not my thing. They seem to be the start of a great story but then suddenly end. Just
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like that! The first story in this collection is living proof: as a story it doesn't go anywhere, but later on Murakami used it as the start of The wind-up bird chronicles, which is - in my opinion - a great novel.

Having said this, I did like some of the stories in this collection. Most of all "The silence" and "The dancing dwarf".
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LibraryThing member hemlokgang
Audiobook, Short Stories................Murakami is one of my favorite authors. He has a marvelous ability to address subtle and grossly obvious aspects of being human. He writes so ably about the human psyche, sometimes to the level of creating discomfort in the reader. In this collection of short
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stories the reader meets a dancing dwarf, workers in an elephant factory, school children, married couples, lonely singles, dreamers, and a host of interesting characters. Murkami is masterful in his use of language and his ability to demonstrate the absurdities, the pains, and the joys of living.
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LibraryThing member Niecierpek
It’s a collection of 17 short stories mostly describing the ordinary lives of people of twenty five to thirty something, into which in some cases permeate bits and pieces of what seems to be other dimensions of reality. Those interferences are all invasive and they radically change the
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characters’ lives.
Not bad, no Murakami is ever bad, but I don’t think short stories are his real forte. Most of the stories seem to be more of the stepping stones into his novels anyway.
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LibraryThing member guiltlessreader
Murakami showcases the prenultimate short story. I actually enjoyed these more than his full length novels.Interestingly, the same names appear ... so one is given a glimpse of his novel's characters outside of their novels.
The first story is excerpted from Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And if you
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haven't read this yet, well, I guess you will want to after having read this anthology!
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LibraryThing member gward101
More hit than miss, but not many bullseyes either. Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories is a must for fans of the Japanese author (myself included), but probably not a good starting point for anyone wanting to learn why he seems to have attracted a legion of dedicated followers. The usual
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ingredients of Murakami's novels are all here, but in too brief a form to be anywhere near as captivating.
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LibraryThing member figre
Haruki Murakami’s strength is the novel. It allows him the chance to truly dig into his strange subjects. Yet, saying his novels are better than his short stories is somewhat like saying that 10 million dollars is better than 9 million dollars. The difference isn’t worth worrying about.

In this
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collection of short stories, Murakami continues to use strange and slightly disturbing situations to explore what makes his antagonists tick. In doing so, we are lucky to join on the journey. There are few misses in this collection. And the hits are grand and memorable.

I have said it before and I will say it again. I approach every new Murakami book with the fear that I will be disappointed. I am never disappointed, I am always enthralled, and I am always thrilled to have discovered Murakami in the first place. Each new reading is like having that first discovery all over again.
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LibraryThing member TakeItOrLeaveIt
reading Murakami short stories is a nice change up from his typical long drawn out adventures and he is able to really explore stories more than characters. however, this didn't leave the same lasting impression that many of his other books did.
LibraryThing member cinesnail88
This was my first venture into the work of Haruki Murakami, and I found myself greeted with a lot of expected things - but also plenty of surprises. This set of stories was very unique, though they all shared a small connecting thread. Extremely interesting writer, I will be reading his other works
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shortly.
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LibraryThing member Periodista
Murakami's nether world. Or nether Japan. All these people are so alone, atomized, lurking in the fringe of the salaryman world.
I think I would read these stories and Murakami very differently if I hadn't lived in Japan. On the one hand, he's constantly dropping mentions of US pop culture (music
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from the 1960's, 1970's) as well as classical music ...which I guess exists ... but it's the absence of the much huger pile of Japan pop culture--all the kitsch, the kiddyporn, the regular porn, candy-grade corporate produced Japanese pop music, the dumb women culture, and oh, the intense congestion--that makes this seem more like science fiction. There is even one story when a terrible clawed beast comes out of the earth the the female protagonist reflexively slays it.
You'd never get a feel for what Tokyo or Japan looks like from these stories. Or what Japanese women look like or wear (and there are a lot of women in his stories, sometimes as narrators). His characters don't talk like the average college graduate women either. You'd never guess the extent of building and living and traffic congestion. How hard it is to do some of the things his characters do so effortlessly (like drive somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo from the central part).
I want to know who the Murakami fans are. Is this something they make public if they are salarymen or office ladies? Or maybe they're the people condemned, whether they like it or not, to always be part of the freeter workforce?
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LibraryThing member plabebob
I'm not a massive fan of short stories but there are some real gems in here. Surreal, thought provoking & engaging.
LibraryThing member RajivC
This is possibly the only book of Murakami's that I did not get into with my heart. It simply had no appeal to me. Personally, I think that his forte is the novel, and not short stories. As I would get into a story, it would end, and I found this rather disconcerting.

I read the book twice, with a
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3 year gap in between, and my reaction the second time around was the same as the first.

This is one book that is not for me
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LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
The stories collected here may not be individually compelling, at least not initially. Together they generate certain harmonics, overtones that reappear reflected or distorted as they move from one story to the next. Lassitude is, perhaps, the overarching emotional dynamic (if lassitude can be a
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dynamic). And most often the main character is struggling to reach escape velocity from the doldrums of the middle years (25 to 35) in which, it seems, these individuals are not yet fully formed (like an echo of adolescence).

The title story stands out, with its casual magic realist plot device, but equally telling is “TV People” and “The Dancing Dwarf”, which for some reason had me thinking of Peter Carey’s Tristan Smith. On the other hand, “The Second Bakery Attack”, “Lederhosen”, and “Barn Burning” cross the cusp of a life-change without appeal to non-realist technique, and they do this just as effectively.

Characteristic Murakami internationalist brand references abound and only one or two of the stories is tightly fixed to a Japanese locale. Sometimes it feels as though this is writing for the export market. Or maybe that veneer appeals locally. In any case, it does not detract from a set of stories that may continuing sounding long after the book is set aside.
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LibraryThing member PghDragonMan
It has been noted elsewhere that anthologies are difficult to rate: one sufficiently good, or bad, story may skew the readers perspective on all the rest. Luckily, this is not the case for The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of 17 short stories by Haruki Murakami; most very good and few rise above
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that to great.

One standout is The Wind Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women, a longish short story that was later expanded into the novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. As a short story, it has a sinister overshadowing that I do not recall from the novel. I think because that through the expansion into a novel some of the internal tension was relieved. You can certainly understand why the author expanded this work: even if you did not know there was a related longer work, you feel there is more to the story being told and you want it all. The author made very good use of the story to get you hooked.

For me, Sleep was another standout story. It is the story of a woman who is not so much of an insomniac as she is a person who decides there are better things to do than sleep. She begins, innocently enough, by reading a book and realizing she is more interested in reading than in sleeping. From there, she makes a conscious choice to give up sleep. Biological reality catches up with her as the human body cannot be deprived of sleep without suffering for it. What happens when sleep deprivation catches up with her is the final twist to the story.

Murakami has a uniquely surrealistic style and two stories exploring this genre are Little Green Monster and TV People. Little Green Monster is almost humorous in a perverse vein and is very enjoyable because of the styling. TV People could be a Twilight episode of that series was still in production. I could almost envision this story as being turned into a screenplay, no pun intended, as a short feature.

The Dancing Dwarf is another patently surrealistic offering that I could see expanded into longer work. Who else but Haruki Murakami could get away with telling us that elephants are made in a factory from reconstituted elephant parts because there is more demand for elephants than there is a natural supply? This is also something of a ghost story because the dwarf is no longer living, but does take possession of a living body. What follows is a contest of who gets to keep possession of the body and live happily ever after.

Overall, I’d rate the collection as a solid four stars. Some of the individual stories are a great as anything I’ve read from Murakami, other are not up to that standard and pull the collection down. If you really like twisted tales, this collection is sure to please.

Note: not part of my rating, but I had some major problems with the pronunciation of some words in the audio book I listened to. I’m not talking about how some of the Japanese words were pronounced differently from what I would have expected. I am not a speaker of the Japanese language and I presume someone made sure they were correct. I mean some of the English words. The narrators are all, I believe, native English language speakers. Why then, for example, does “soldering iron” come out sounding like a military weapon with a clearly pronounced “L”? There are other examples, but I don’t want to dwell on the annoyances. The stories are great, and that’s what you should be paying attention to.
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LibraryThing member mykl-s
Murakami gives us 17 short stories, published in Japan in, I believe, mostly the 1980s, collected in English translations in 1993, and presented in a very readable paperback.

So these may be some of his first writings that have seen the light of day. They all have his mark of realism mixed with
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kinds of speculative fictiion.

With 70 reviews already, there is not much I could add, though I don't read other's ideas until I've posted mine. Each story was good in its way, some made me a bit uncomfortable, others entranced me. The final story, the title story, was a well chosen and excellent ending.
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LibraryThing member reader1009
adult fiction/short stories (on audio). Dramatically told by a cast of professional voices, these stories were strange and thought-provoking. I don't know what I was expecting (not having read Murakami before) but the collection as a whole was not as calm and sleep-inducing as I'd have liked (since
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that is my primary use of these books-on-playaway these days).
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LibraryThing member macha
these stories come from the same period as Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - oboy, there's even a story from the same block that novel inhabits. the cat is missing. is it surrealist, or just postmodern? everything is ordinary: an ordinary person, couple, conversation, milieu. there's a feeling in the air:
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of dream, or dread, or waiting. the stories are luminous, sharp, very clear. things go on underneath them. it's a marvellous collection, not to be missed.
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LibraryThing member modioperandi
The quote from Henry David Thoreau goes something like, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I thought of that quote a lot when reading this book. This book is a series of short stories. It seemed to me, the recurring theme in these stories is this: The main character gets a glimpse of
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something extraordinary (sometimes potentially supernatural, sometimes not, but always extraordinary). But, then the pull of the mundane life takes over and they are drawn back into it. The book is full of missed opportunities to experience the extraordinary.

As with all of Murakami's books, this one is well written, especially the character development. In some of these short stories, there are hints of his longer works. Such as, one is practically a prologue to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This book is worth reading, for sure.
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LibraryThing member SigmundFraud
The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami is a master work of prose. Nobody writes prose better than Murakami who deserves the Nobel but will never win it because his subjects are not political. Each story in this collection is a jewel. Not much happens in many of them but they are a work
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of beauty and can be enjoyed for their magnificent language. This collection is definitely worth a detour.
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