The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

“A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind up the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.”

The narrator conceives of the world in metaphorical analogy to the otherwise unidentified “wind-up bird” (he does not know what the bird is really called), an idea that reflects his dissatisfaction with the repetitive routine of his life. Behind this existential anxiety, as often, is a fear of death, imagined here as a corporeal and almost tumor-like mass “swelling inside me” whose result is non-being (even as the rest of the world continues to exist, indefinite and indifferent).

“I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.”

The first sentences of this story highlight the passive and indecisive character of the narrator, who seems to live by a very fatalistic credo (“we never choose anything at all”). This credo foreshadows the story itself, where the man simply follows his wife’s lead in the “second bakery attack.”

“Now, what is this Nobility of Imperfection?, you may ask—who wouldn’t ask? Well, simply put, the Nobility of Imperfection might mean nothing so much as the proposition that someone in effect forgives someone else. I forgive the kangaroos, the kangaroos forgive you, you forgive me—to cite but one example.”

The narrator’s idea of the “Nobility of Imperfection” is a kind of embracing of the social relationships that are so important in life. It is also an acceptance (or forgiveness) of the inherent imperfections of existence, an idea that conflicts in some ways with the narrator’s impossible desire to be in two places at once (itself a manifestation of his disappointment with the imperfections of existence).

“Shall I put it on the line?

I want to be able to be in two places at once. That is my one and only wish. Other than that, there’s not a thing I desire.”

The narrator’s desire here to be in two places at once represents a very distinctive kind of dissatisfaction with or Existential Anxiety in the Modern World: The narrator is not merely lonely or unhappy but is not content with the fundamental nature of existence. This longing for a double existence reflects the contradictions and imbalances in the narrator’s character and above all his objecting to but striving for imperfection.

“Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either—must be near thirty, not even close to a ‘girl,’ properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.”

The straightforward, colloquial language of the passage belies the magical and even miraculous notion that we all have somebody who is 100% perfect for us. How, after all, can the narrator know that this girl is perfect for him? He is hardly impressed by her appearance (later, he cannot even remember anything concrete about what she looks like), and he does not know anything about her because he does not say a word to her. Is there something magical about the narrator’s certainty that this is the 100% perfect girl for him, or do his feelings reflect his own deep-seated feelings of loneliness?

“After I gave up sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It’s just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it’s just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.”

The narrator’s idea of reality as something cold and mechanical reflects her state of mind and her discontentment—which she only hints at to herself—with her life and her relationship with her husband and her son. The woman seems to have resigned herself to a joyless existence, with her only happiness and freedom coming in the sleepless nights that she has to herself. Of course, this cannot last: The narrator is not quite the evolutionary marvel she thinks she is, and the story ends with her collapsing of fatigue in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night as her car is attacked.

“I felt that I had always been meant to be like this. By abandoning sleep I had expanded myself. The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.”

The narrator’s feeling of having “expanded” herself is a very isolating feeling, a feeling that separates her from all other human beings, including her husband and son. The narrator’s “power to concentrate,” which becomes the “most important thing” for her, thus comes at the expense of her relationship with her family, pointing to the novel’s theme of Internality and Social Relationships.

“Precisely because of this meticulous system of mine, I have managed to keep a diary for twenty-two years without missing a day. To every meaningful act, its own system. Whether the wind blows or not, that’s the way I live.”

The narrator’s perfectionism shines through in the final lines of the story, where he reflects with a certain pride on the “meticulous system” that has allowed him to keep a diary for so long. But why does the narrator keep a diary? This question is never answered, but perhaps it is unnecessary: The narrator seems to find the act of keeping a diary meaningful in itself, just as he finds meaning throughout the story in many other things one might consider mundane (the wind, cooking, etc.).

“True, luck may rule over parts of a person’s life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there’s a will—much less a strong will to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers—there’s a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around. No, her heart was never set on marrying, is how I see it. Marriage just doesn’t fall within the sweep of her comet, at least not entirely.”

The narrator’s worldview grants a privileged position to will, placing it above luck: If a strong-willed woman like his wife’s friend is unmarried, he reasons, it is not merely because she is unlucky (as his wife claims) but because she lacks the will to get married. The story the woman proceeds to tell about her parents’ divorce (the story of the lederhosen) sheds further light on why she may have never had the will to marry.

“In so many words, it doesn’t sound like much, but I swear, just watching her do this for ten or twenty minutes […] I felt the reality of everything around me being siphoned away. Unnerving, to say the least.”

This passage evokes one of Murakami’s favorite themes: Perception Versus Reality. The girl’s interest in mime underscores her own innocence and disinterest in the material world, while simultaneously the narrator’s response demonstrates his own attachment to that very material world (to him, having his reality “siphoned away” is an “unnerving” feeling).

“‘A person can’t exist without morals. I wouldn’t doubt if morals were the very balance to my simultaneity.’

‘Simultaneity?’

‘Right, I’m here, and I’m here. I’m in Tokyo, and at the same time I’m in Tunis. I’m the one to blame, and I’m also the one to forgive. Just as a for instance. It’s that level of balance. Without such balance, I don’t think we could go on living. It’s like the linchpin to everything. Lose it and we’d literally go to pieces. But for the very reason that I’ve got it, simultaneity becomes possible for me.’”

The boyfriend’s reference to his “simultaneity” strikingly echoes the wish of the narrator in “The Kangaroo Communiqué” to be in two places at once. Is this a hint that the boyfriend, with his “balance” of morals, represents something more than human? Or is his “simultaneity” a metaphor for the complex and often contradictory nature of human beings and their relationships?

“See, then, you little monster, you have no idea what a woman is. There’s no end to the number of things I can think of to do to you.”

The narrator uses the monster’s mind-reading abilities against it, highlighting the many torments she can imagine for it as a woman, suggesting a feminist or even psychoanalytic lens on the story, with the monster representing a sexual assault the woman has experienced and repressed.

“It probably happens all the time, but I disliked my kid sister’s fiancé right from the start. And the less I liked him, the more doubts I had about her. I was disappointed in her for the choice she had made.

Maybe I’m just narrow-minded.”

The opening of “Family Affair” hints that the narrator’s dislike of his sister’s fiancé is just a reflection of his dissatisfaction with his own life and personality (“maybe I’m just narrow-minded”). The narrator seems incapable of taking himself and his life too seriously, even undercutting his feelings toward his sister’s fiancé with an acknowledgement that his situation is not unique (“It probably happens all the time”).

“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.”

The artificiality of the letters the narrator reads and writes during his tenure as a “Pen Master” leads him to reflect on the nature of Perception Versus Reality: Reality, like letters, is something that is created. This creation then becomes what we “convey to people” and what gives meaning to our identities and our social relationships.

“There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate.”

The narrator is a character who considers things from many different angles. Contained with his seemingly trivial speculation about whether he should have slept with the woman are questions about the woman’s happiness, her relationship with her husband, and the narrator’s own identity. The narrator’s conclusion that “there are lots of things we never understand” suggests that some questions have many possible answers and interpretations (so that the “window” of the story’s title becomes a metaphor for the “things we never understand,” an elusive explanation concealed within a multitude).

“Not to excuse myself, but you have people right in front of you denying your very presence like that, then see if you don’t doubt whether you actually exist. I look at my hands half expecting to see clear through them. I’m devastated, powerless, in a trance. My body, my mind are vanishing fast. I can’t bring myself to move.”

It is telling that the narrator doubts his own existence before he doubts the existence of the TV People (to the reader, on the other hand, the more obvious explanation is that the narrator is experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations). But how else is the narrator to interpret his experiences, when he apparently sees the TV People so clearly (even when other characters in the story do not)? This story’s answer to questions of Perception Versus Reality is that the narrator’s perception creates its own reality, an experience that leaves him feeling literally paralyzed.

“Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively 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?”

Memory—and the unreliability of memory—is an important theme in this story in which the narrator reflects on his idiosyncratic experiences with people from China. Throughout the story the narrator is torn between trying to record his experiences as accurately as possible and simply recording his impressions more generally, producing in the process a meditation on the malleability of memory.

“If the time comes to remember, you’ll remember. That’s how it goes. Memory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.”

The subject of memory surfaces again at the end of the story in a small speech spoken by a childhood acquaintance of the narrator. The acquaintance assumes a more relaxed, fatalistic approach to memory—while the narrator wrestles with the imperfect nature of his memory as he tries to record events from his past as accurately as possible, the acquaintance is content to believe that we remember what we ought to remember and forget what we ought to forget.

“Misdiagnosis, as a psychiatrist might say, as it was with that Chinese girl. Maybe, in the end, our hopes were the wrong way around. But what am I, what are you, if not a misdiagnosis? And if so, is there a way out?”

The narrator’s use of the term “misdiagnosis” to describe his relationship to his own personal China must be understood within the context of the story’s exploration of memory and its connection to the human search for social connection. The narrator’s experiences with Chinese people have reflected his own perceptions and the development of his own personal attitudes on identity, memory, pride, love, and respect. These experiences ultimately have little to do with any external reality. The narrator’s China is his own personal China, not an actual, objective China, and is thus a kind of “misdiagnosis.” But since all people experience reality filtered through their own experiences, the line between misdiagnosis and diagnosis—Perception Versus Reality—becomes blurred.

“Needless to say, the manufacture of elephants is no easy matter. They’re big, first of all, and very complex.”

This passage underscores the absurd and alien nature of the world of the story in which dwarves dance, elephants are manufactured in a factory, and a mysterious revolution has recently unseated the previous monarchical regime. At the same time, Murakami imbues his alternative world with its own realism through the narrator’s matter-of-fact language (“needless to say,” “first of all”).

“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.”

Murakami returns to the theme of Perception Versus Reality and exploration of memory, so prominent in his stories—specifically, he highlights the unreliability of memory and its proximity to “fiction.” In so doing, the story raises interesting questions about the nature of reality itself: For if even our memories are so similar to fiction, reality no longer seems so real, while fiction no longer seems so fictional.

“In those dreams, there’s only the silence. And these faceless people. Their silence seeps into everything like ice water. And then it all goes murky. And I’m dissolving and I’m screaming, but no one hears.”

The motif of sound is prominent throughout Murakami’s stories; in this story, this motif is metamorphosed into its opposite, silence. This silence represents isolation and the absence of social connection, which is what haunts Ozawa here far more than even the lies Aoki told about him in his school days.

“In fact, I had wondered at the time whether my eyes were playing tricks on me. I had tried closing and opening them and shaking my head, but the elephant’s size remained the same.”

The narrator’s sight of the elephant and his keeper shrinking seems to defy logic, and yet he perceives it clearly—and it is also, ostensibly, the only possible explanation for the elephant’s disappearance. His confusion points to the novel’s theme of Perception Versus Reality: Are the man’s senses deceiving him, or is it reason that is illusory in this scenario?