Review of Elephant Vanishes

This collection of short stories is like that clichéd box of chocolates. There are stories that are rich with just the right flavors, and then there are those ones that don’t taste all that good yet they get eaten anyways because they’re chocolate. Overall most of the stories were fun to read leaving just one or two that were not so much fun to read. All of the stories are unique and full of original ideas and thoughts.
The stories that didn’t work so much for me were Sleep and The Last Lawn of the Afternoon. Sleep is the story of a housewife who suddenly becomes unable to sleep and fills her extra time drinking brandy and reading Anna Karenina (a staple of many Murakami characters). Sleep had no breaks in it, and was a rather long, short story. Reading it was almost like experiencing sleeplessness myself, growing crazy with that mind numbing, cannot sleep feeling. What it did well though is show how monotonous two weeks without sleep would be like. The difficult parts of reading this story also made it more real, but it is a story I wouldn’t read again.
The Last Lawn of the Afternoon is another similar story, giving many frivolous and repetitive details, this time about lawn mowing. Details about this young man’s obsessive-compulsive need to no only cut the lawn, but get in with shears for a perfect length. Potentially this character could have been interesting or funny with his desire, but instead he is just a normal guy cutting lawns. Having mowed many lawns in my time, I found I could care less about this obsessive compulsive lawn cutter.
What the rest of the stories do well is offer a fairly wide range of characters that are fairly unique from each other. Even similar characters react in different ways. There are several young single guys, with somewhat similar morals, but they all treat their girlfriend and themselves in different ways. The housewives or single women all act in different ways as well. What all of these characters have in common is they are generally average people who find themselves in unusual and repetitive situations yet bring an original point of view forth. The name Noburu Watanabe also seems to pop up here and there for no apparent reason, but it provides a common thread through the stories, even if Mr. Watanabe is never the same being.
The Elephant Vanishes is also full of imagination. Almost every story is strange somehow, some are funny and one or two are kind of sad. I have never seen such a wide range of events outside of the Twilight Zone. The stories I liked best were: The Wind up Bird and Tuesday’s Women, a story about a man in search of his cat, but the man runs afoul of unusual and often times frustrating women. I found this story playful and fun. The Second Bakery Attack, another fun story about a couple that holds up a McDonald’s for food yet pays for their soda. To contrast, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning was quite heart warming and almost made me cry at the lost love. The Silence was another tense story that I enjoyed.
The Dancing Dwarf is about a man that works in a factory that makes elephants. Real elephants. In this same story, he submits himself to a fairytale-esque bargain with a dwarf to win the heart of a beautiful woman. The tale takes enough directions to be interesting and the descriptions of working in a factory that makes elephants was an interesting feature. The story’s twist ending would be perfect in the Twilight Zone.
TV People was for me one of the most interesting stories. TV People (who are about 20% Xerox copy-esque smaller than normal people) deliver TVs to people and are ignored by everyone except the narrator. The TV’s pick up nothing but static, and the TV people are bizarre themselves. When the narrator brings them up, he is ostracized or ignored by others. Is there some sort of symbolic meaning here? Is the author saying that people who watch TV get nothing of value and if you realize it you become an outcast? The narrator never reveals the answer, ending instead on a bizarre program and an ambiguous ending. Sleep, mentioned earlier, has an ambiguous ending making me wonder if Murakami ended these stories that way on purpose or just wanted to make us think. Both stories imply a bad ending but it is never explicit.
While reading Murakami’s stories I have to admit I wasn’t looking for any hidden meanings or symbolism, though I am sure it is there. I would have to read it again several times. If I had to guess, I’d say there were a few that could be fairly obvious. The McDonald’s robbery begins with a husband and wife’s ravenous hunger. Could this hunger be related to some unfulfilled need in each other?