The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

The Elephant Vanishes (1991) is the first collection of short stories published by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The stories were written between 1980 and 1991, and many had already been published in periodicals before the collection was published. At the time the collection was published, Murakami had already written a few successful novels, and he remains active as a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. The short story collection was highly praised after its release and received attention internationally. Like other works by Murakami, the short stories incorporate elements of surrealism and magical realism and address themes such as Existential Anxiety in the Modern World, Perception Versus Reality, and Internality and Social Relationships.

This guide refers to the 1993 translation by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin, published by Knopf.

Content Warning: Murakami’s stories address issues such as addiction, death by suicide, and pedophilia.

Plot Summaries

There are 17 stories in The Elephant Vanishes, each using surrealism to reflect on aspects of human life such as pain, regret, and loss.

In the first story, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” the narrator is an unemployed stay-at-home husband who is unsure what he wants to do with his life. An unknown woman repeatedly calls him asking for 10 minutes of his time and suggesting that she has an erotic interest in him. Later, while searching for his wife’s lost cat, he meets a teenage girl in a neighbor’s garden and spends the afternoon with her. In the evening, he and his wife fight.

In “The Second Bakery Attack,” a young married couple are so hungry that they cannot sleep. As they try to decide what to do about their hunger, the man tells his wife about a time he and his friend tried to rob a bakery 10 years before. The wife attributes their hunger to the failure of this earlier robbery, and decides that the only way for them to break this “curse” is to rob another bakery. Since it is past two in the morning, however, they cannot find any open bakeries, and so rob a McDonald’s instead.

“The Kangaroo Communiqué” is a letter. The narrator is a man who works in product control for a department store. Recently, he has received a letter of complaint from a woman who purchased a record of Mahler instead of Brahms. He explains that this letter intrigued and even sexually aroused him, prompting him to make personal contact with the woman. Since he decided to write the letter while watching kangaroos at the zoo, he calls the letter “The Kangaroo Communiqué.”

In “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” the narrator describes walking by the “100% perfect girl” for him in the Harajuku neighborhood in Tokyo. Later, while thinking of what he should have said to the girl, he imagines a story about a boy and a girl who realize that they are perfect for each other but part and never reconnect.

The narrator of “Sleep” is a woman who has not slept for 17 days but does not feel tired. She does not tell her husband or son about her condition and spends her nights reading, drinking brandy, and eating chocolate. One night, she drives to a deserted parking lot, where her car is attacked.

The narrator of the next story, “The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds,” is a man who keeps a diary. One Sunday, as he is updating his diary, a fierce wind blows in suddenly, and he jots down three phrases to help him remember the day’s events when he writes them up in his diary the following Sunday.

In “Lederhosen,” a woman tells the narrator about how her parents divorced over a pair of lederhosen. On a trip to Germany, her mother went to a shop to buy her husband souvenir lederhosen, but the shop would not sell her anything without her husband there to be properly fitted. Undeterred, the mother found a stranger of the same size and build as her husband, but as the lederhosen were being fitted, she decided that she wanted a divorce.

“Barn Burning” is narrated by a 31-year-old married man who begins an ambiguous relationship with a 20-year-old woman. After a trip to Algiers, the woman returns with a Japanese boyfriend who confesses to a compulsion for burning barns. The man tries unsuccessfully to discover which barn the boyfriend is planning to burn next. Meanwhile, the girl disappears mysteriously.

In “The Little Green Monster,” the female narrator is alarmed one day when a monster emerges from her garden, enters her house, and proclaims his love for her. The woman realizes the monster can read her mind, and she uses this to taunt him and reject him. Devastated, the monster withers away into a shadow.

“Family Affair” is narrated by a young man who lives with his younger sister in a shared Tokyo apartment. The narrator disapproves of his sister’s engagement to a man named Noboru Watanabe, though after interacting with him on a few occasions, he admits he isn’t a bad guy. The narrator’s sister tells him he needs to grow up and that he cannot spend his whole life drinking and having promiscuous sex.

“A Window” is about a university student who takes a job at “The Pen Society” responding to and critiquing letters from members. After he leaves the job, he accepts an invitation to eat dinner at the home of one of his correspondents, a young married woman.

In “TV People,” the narrator describes the TV People, who are 20 or 30% smaller than regular people. The TV People install a television in the narrator’s apartment, but his wife does not notice. He also sees them at his job, but his colleagues do not acknowledge them. One night, his wife does not come home, and the narrator has another encounter with the TV People.

In “A Slow Boat to China,” the narrator reflects on his interactions with Chinese people, particularly a teacher who proctored a standardized aptitude test he took as a child, a 19-year-old college student he used to work with in Tokyo, and a former classmate turned businessman he ran into at a coffee shop.

“The Dancing Dwarf” is set in an alternative reality where the narrator, who works in a factory manufacturing elephants, begins dreaming of a dancing dwarf. He enlists the dwarf’s help to seduce a beautiful colleague at the factory, but his contact with the dwarf proves disastrous for him.

“The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” is narrated by a young student who mows lawns in the summers to earn extra money. After he splits up with his girlfriend, the man decides to leave the job, as he no longer needs the money. He describes his final assignment, highlighting the joy and pride he takes in his work.

In “The Silence,” the narrator’s friend Ozawa, an amateur boxer, tells the narrator about the consequences of the only fight he has been in. Ozawa describes how he became embroiled in a feud with a classmate named Aoki in middle school, eventually hitting him when he accused him of cheating on a test. Later, in their final year of high school, a classmate of both boys named Matsumoto ended his life. Ozawa was suspected of bullying him, and this rumor (which Ozawa believes to have been spread by Aoki) caused his classmates to ignore him for the rest of high school. Even today, Ozawa is haunted by this period of silence.

“The Elephant Vanishes,” the last story in the collection, describes the mysterious disappearance of an old elephant and its keeper from a Tokyo suburb. The narrator, who has long been interested in the elephant, details the elephant’s history. Later, he tells a woman he met through work about how he saw the elephant and his keeper begin to shrink in size the night before they were reported missing.