56 pages • 1 hour read
The Elephant Vanishes: Stories
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Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”
“The Second Bakery Attack”
“The Kangaroo Communiqué”
“On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”
“Sleep”
“The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds”
“Lederhosen”
“Barn Burning”
“The Little Green Monster”
“Family Affair”
“A Window”
“TV People”
“A Slow Boat to China”
“The Dancing Dwarf”
“The Last Lawn of the Afternoon”
“The Silence”
“The Elephant Vanishes”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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Beta“The Dancing Dwarf”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“The Dancing Dwarf” Summary
Note: Although the term “dwarf” is used in medical jargon and often used in everyday speech, people with this condition often prefer the term “little person.” The term should be used with caution when discussing this story.
The narrator dreams of a dancing dwarf whose preternatural skill he admires. He goes to his place of business, a factory that manufactures elephants, where he tells a colleague about his dream. The colleague eventually remembers that he has heard about a dancing dwarf once before from an elderly man who works at the factory. The narrator approaches the old man at a bar and asks him about the dwarf. At the narrator’s insistence, the old man recounts how the dwarf, who came from the north, made a name for himself as a gifted dancer, and eventually even danced for the king before the revolution that unseated him. After the revolution, the dwarf disappeared. The old man also mentions rumors that the dwarf possesses a sinister power and may have even caused the revolution.
Soon after, the narrator finds out about a beautiful new worker at the factory and goes to great trouble to meet her, but the woman shows no interest in the narrator. That night, the dwarf appears to the narrator in a dream again. He makes the man an offer: He will help him seduce the girl by taking control of his body and dancing with her. After the man has slept with the girl, the dwarf will return his body—but if the man speaks at any point, the dwarf will possess his body forever. The man agrees. His dancing wins the girl’s heart, and the two retreat to a clearing to make love. The narrator sees the girl suddenly begin to decay, but he realizes that the dwarf is trying to trick him and does not scream. The dwarf leaves his body but promises that he will return.
The police come after the narrator, realizing that he has had some sort of contact with the dwarf. The man hides in the forest. In his dreams, the dwarf demands that he let him inside him, but the man resists.
“The Dancing Dwarf” Analysis
In “The Dancing Dwarf,” Murakami fashions a magical and surreal world to explore themes of Internality and Social Relationships and Perception Versus Reality. In the alternative world of this story, sinister dwarves dance in people’s dreams, elephants are manufactured in factories, and a post-revolutionary society grapples with the remnants of an earlier monarchical regime. Alien as it is from the current world, the world of “The Dancing Dwarf” is conceived in self-contained and realistic terms, with even a career as outlandish as the manufacturing of elephants reading as something almost mundane.
The narrator, by his own admission, is an average character. He is not particularly attractive and does not possess any special skills. He is surprised by the dwarf’s interest in him, and realizes that the only way he can seduce his beautiful colleague is by letting the dwarf possess his body to dance with her. The narrator is an everyman, and despite the surrealist aspects of his world, he wrestles with issues that are deeply familiar—going to work, searching for love and social connection, and questioning the nature of reality. The narrator realizes that his perceptions are not always to be trusted (as when the dwarf tries to trick the narrator by making his love interest appear to him like a rotting corpse). At other times, the things the narrator perceives as unreal—notably, his dreams of the dwarf—do reflect reality.
The narrator perceives the dwarf as a kind of sinister force that targets the narrator for reasons he can’t fathom, but over the course of the story, the dwarf also becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s own repressed identity—his deepest passions or desires, which he hides from society and even from himself. In psychoanalytic terms, the dwarf can be seen as a manifestation of Freud’s primal Id. Just as the Id must be suppressed for a person to function within society and form connections to and community with others, the narrator’s acceptance of the dwarf drives him outside of society at the end of the story. Murakami suggests that every person has a dancing dwarf inside of them—a dancing dwarf that they must be very careful to control and contain.
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By Haruki Murakami
