The elephant disappears by Haruki Murakami

The Elephant Vanishes is the first collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami released in the United States. It consists of 15 stories that show his work at its best, from magical lands with dancing dwarfs, giant elephants and a man looking for his cat. However, each thing is uniquely Murakami, and each of these stories is worth your time to read, and some of them to read the novel they’re attached to. Here are some notes I took while reading the collection and some thoughts on his work in general.

– Murakami uses a unique human feeling or emotion for each of his stories, then expands and distorts, contracts and expands that emotion as he pleases. The use of loneliness, hunger and tiredness comes to mind.

– Your concepts about reality are very interesting. He is constantly letting the characters recreate it for themselves, the way they want. The presence of the dual reality is consistent, in which there is a layer below the actual reality with which the character must accept.

– Use the journal and memory as a common device. The narrator’s memory and how it is used is constantly mentioned and discussed. His use of a diary is repeated as a means of organization and structure in the dynamic and chaotic lives of his protagonists, giving their lives a much more structured form.

The String Bird and the Women of Tuesday

The first story was very strange. Mainly because it’s not really a story, but rather the first chapter of his most famous book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. After failing to find the cat, he travels to the blocked alley to search and ends up in a sunbathing girl’s backyard, where he falls asleep on a lawn chair. A series of inappropriate phone conversations with a stranger, and the strange girl in the alley sets up one of the best stories from him in that novel, but they’re a bit out of place here since all you get is the first chapter. However, in typical Murakami fashion, any chapter of any of his books could be read on its own and make sense, since very little tends to happen in the physical reality of his characters. Instead, something else is going on here that you feel rather than observe. He heartily sets the tone for the rest of the book and prepares the reader for the oddities to come.

The second attack on the bakery

The second story was also strange, in its execution. The hunger curse is interesting to me because it seems to be the result of a more psychological problem. His wife is an inherently violent person here and that doesn’t seem to make much sense. What purpose does her violence serve? Why is she also hit by the curse and why hasn’t he felt this hunger since the time in the bakery? I think you might need a partner to feel this hunger. His best friend was around the last time it happened, and then he was gone. Without a cabal it doesn’t matter how he feels. However, the famine appears only 2 weeks after her marriage, and she deals with the matter quite efficiently. However, her apparent knowledge on the subject is interesting. She arouses suspicion in the narrator. Something that Murakami also does in the first story. A kind of underlying suspicion of this man towards his wife.

The kangaroo communicates

The third story was very good for me. The way he starts off, completely off topic, explaining 36 steps of thought of his, which we never actually get to hear, and then he goes on, the various tangents in his conversation are brilliant. The man has a terribly boring and depressing job and when he finds a gem in his pile of coal, he takes it relentlessly. He wants to talk to this girl. He wants to get to know her. He goes on to talk about his desire to be alive in a dual state. He wants to exist in two places at once. A desire to overcome the monotony of his life and yet not abandon her at the same time. He is afraid of change and this is his way of dealing with it, not changing. He therefore, he records this letter to the girl and tells her things that are probably not appropriate. But they are his, another me of him acting. The lonely department store self is pushed aside and this second self, the self that wants to sleep with her and write her this letter, comes out without fear of consequences.

On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

This is another brilliant story that I couldn’t get over. It was short and to the point, offering no plot or development. Just a very interesting series of thoughts and a seed of doubt in the reader about what really happened. Murakami’s narrator sees a girl on the street who knows that she is perfect for him. She doesn’t know how or why, she just is her. Love at first sight. Although she does nothing. Guess unfolds the ultimately tragic or ultimately romantic story that exists below the surface. If he had told her her story and they had gotten together, the reader is left thinking how horribly romantic this is. However, since he doesn’t talk to her, I wonder if this story could be true. How horribly sad that would be. This is a story about opportunities. About taking chances in life and making the most of them. Don’t let fate kick your ass. Twice the narrator leaves his girl 100% perfect. Once in his story and once in real life. she will never come back to him

asleep

This is a very interesting story. It addresses a lot of different little things about his life. She seems to be lost in a world of her own creation. Lost to the arrogance of her husband’s family, she has lost everything about her in her life that made her her. When she stops sleeping she is denying reality to get that part of her back. She is going against the destiny that she has built for herself and is creating a new reality for herself. In doing so, she must face death and in that she ends up facing it. Her perceptions of her reality are completely skewed. In this she creates a new one. One where she maintains her own identity. Not the one she gave her husband. She is going through a mid-life crisis and her way of coping is as such.

The fall of the Roman Empire, the Indian uprising of 1881, Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the kingdom of angry winds

This piece uses key events to mark the narrator’s own personal history. He follows a simple day of events for him and marks small normal events as big events with historical metaphor. It is as if he were saying that one’s whole life can be marked and remembered by key points and words without all the details. There is a certain linearity in our lives that makes life easier to remember.

lederhosen

The lederhosen act as a catalyst for her to take a step back and see the world and her life for what it was. Up to that point she had built an illusory world in which she lived. She couldn’t pull out of him and see how much she didn’t want to. She had to understand in it to do it. When she finds the guy who looks like her husband but she isn’t, she can see what she has from an outside point of view. This disturbs her and because of this she is able to overcome her emotions and forget about her husband.

burning barn

This is a pretty horrible little story. The man from Africa is a murderer or a really horrible person who scared her. I lean towards the former in the way he described how the barn was calling out to be burned. The narrator’s closeness to the girl is important here because it counters the man’s statement about the need to burn down the barn. His whole idea is that the barn is old and useless and won’t hurt anyone, but this latest barn is such that the narrator is affected. Therefore, it was not harmless. However, he is unaware of the correlation and continues to search for the barn and the girl. This leads back to the issue of dual existence in which he is trying to search for the literal object that has not been burned and within his mind he searches for the figurative object, the girl he misses, who has been removed from his life. the. Very Poe-like and quite disturbing.

little green monster

She rebukes love. In doing so, her every move, every bad thought and misbehavior hurts the creature. It seems like a metaphor for rejection. She rejects the creature’s unrequited love and in doing so destroys it. She sees him only for what he is, a hideously ugly creature, ignorant of her love and her calm manner. Instead of finding out what she means or how to get him back to her home, she mercilessly destroys it. Her passion draws him to her home, unwanted, and so her malice is unleashed, almost reflexively. The author seems to be making a statement about the women here and how relentless they can be for the love of a man. Also a statement about the blindness of love and how the man will react without thinking and without weighing the choices involved.

family affair

I found this story to be quite mixed with subplots and hidden meanings. It was all done in a very subtle way, true to Murakami’s style and it really hit home, especially at the end, with its forceful and matter-of-fact storytelling. First of all, the narrator and his sister are just what he says, “partners.” Partners in living a mindless lifestyle. She has grown out of it though. In the 5 years they have lived together she has grown and developed a sense of responsibility and place in the world. However, she is still trapped in her own little world of hers, the separate reality of hers. This is often shown by the way she says things that don’t affect her and don’t concern her, like who wins the baseball game. No matter. “I’m not playing, it’s them.” The differences in the narrator and Noburo Watanabe are extensive. One important thing to point out at the beginning is the fact that Watanabe has a name. Very few, if any, characters are given names in Murakami’s stories. This name is important because it symbolizes a place in reality. His place in reality is marked by his name and he conforms through that name. His sister will become part of that reality when he takes the name of this mane. Thus, as a representative of reality, Watanabe begins to destroy the narrator’s fantasy world. At the end of the story, after talking to this man and hearing how pathetic his life is, he first feels the uselessness of his life. His night with the girl from the bar is miserable and that is the first sign of the destruction of his fantasy, leading him to Watanabe’s reality.

Window

There’s not much here that I can discern that the author doesn’t say directly. So, I’ll just quote the last paragraph.

“Should I have slept with her?

That is the central question of this piece.

The answer is beyond me. Even now, I have no idea. There is a lot of
things we never understand, no matter how old we get, no matter how
We have a lot of experience. All I can do is look from the train into the windows of the buildings that could be his. Each one of them could be his window, sometimes it seems to me, and other times I think that none of them could be his. There are just too many of them.”

Life has many possibilities. The simple place of your window is such that it could be anywhere, or even nowhere.