The Elephant Vanishes

The short stories each show an interesting look into the lives of a person's life though they all are interesting enough in their own way. One of my favorites would be "The Second Bakery Attack" which is a short story about a man and his wife who are haunted by an unbearable hunger and so to break the curse they end up robbing a McDonalds. The stories are all intriguing in their own way and everyone of them is as good as the last. I would recommend this to people that love the other works of Haruki Murakami and also those that read Stephen King's short stories will love Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes".

A collection of stories, that ends with the surreal "the Elephant Vanishes" about a totally ordinary guy who works for a P.R. department of an electrical company (the same guy appears in many stories throughout the book) who thinks he may have watched an elephant in the early stages of shrinking into nothingness. Surreal, but not in a good way, in a very boring way.

Having read a bunch of Murakami's books, I can identify easily the two characters Murakami writes about: the ordinary guy who's married, but whose wife disappears, and the ordinary single guy who drinks too much and likes to play the field. Murakami likes to try to change his stories, but somehow his style is nearly always the same. A guy wakes up, makes toast, thinks about what he's going to do that day. At some point in the story he has a cigarette, he drinks a beer, he thinks about sex, he puts on some Coltrane.

But some of the stories are fun, and the one about the guy who burns barns is in fact mysterious and chilling. There are some interesting phrases throughout. "One morning after New Year's, my mother called me at nine o'clock. I was brushing my teeth to Bruce Springsteen's `Born in the U.S.A.'" Brushing your teeth to the tune of Born in the U.S.A.? Then there are interesting, poetic closing lines to stories. "When I closed my eyes, sleep floated down on me like a dark, silent net."

Of course, there are also totally useless passages. "The door was locked, I think, but I can't be certiain. Maybe I forgot to lock it. It really wasn't foremost in my thoughts at the time, so who knows? Still, I think the door was locked." A writer could fill page after page of `did I lock the door?' Other passages are even worse. "Curiously, the wife makes no mentoin of the appearance of the television set in the apartment. No reaction at all. Zero. It's as if she doesn't even see it. Creepy. Because, as I said before, she's extremely fussy about the order and arrangement of furniture and other things. If someone dares to move anything in the apartment, even by a hair, shel'll jump on it in an instant. That's her ascendancy. She knits her brows, then gets things back the way they were." Of course, it's all in the translation, and I don't know what `that's here ascendancy' is supposed to mean anyway (could somebody translate this phrase to me?). And what's the point of using the phrase `as I said before' in a book? Or any time, for that matter?!

Some of his lines are quite good. In a story about a guy who cuts lawns, there is the line "a couple of times I got a hard-on, then it would go away. Pretty ridiculous, getting a hard-on just mowing a lawn." A few of the story are really very good, like "The Dancing Dwarf" and "Silence." Overall, still a pretty frustrating read from a terribly overrated writer.

A good book is like travel. Sometimes it's not the final destination that matters. It's the journey itself.

To really appreciate a Haruki Murakami novel it's important to adopt that perspective. I enjoy his writing, characters, and stories but often am frustrated at the end. They just stop. The main character comes to a certain growth point, and Murakami walks away from the plot and stops. He often doesn't tie up the loose ends or explain exactly what happened. Presumably it's not important.

The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of Murakami short stories. They all have his unmistakable tone and style.

Some of them have the same frustrating ending. A few are more traditional and wrap up nicely.

Despite the frustrations, I did enjoy the book immensely and have no problem recommending it. Just be prepared for more deliberate loose ends than a pair of leather pants with fringe.

One thing that is fairly common in Murakami's novels is that characters are very accepting of their situation. They don't question things, but drift with the current and do what they're supposed to do. This passage is the epitome of Murakami:

Stretched out in the back seat, long and stiff as a dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun. Its shells rustled dryly in the pocket of my wife's windbreaker. We had two black ski masks in the glove compartment. Why my wife owned a shotgun, I have no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain, and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt.

Page 44

The book is filled with lines like that. And lines like that are why I keep reading Murakami books.

As I put this review together, and as I thought more about the stories, Murakami's main theme became clear. It became clear in a way that may not be evident from individual stories. The last story in the book, the one the title comes from, is the pure essence of Murakami. If you want to see what he writes about, you can start there.

Murakami is writing about loneliness. His characters are alone, some through loss, some through poor choices, and most because that is the way they are. They can have a family, friends, and coworkers, and still be completely alone.

They characters throughout these stories are looking for a genuine heart-to-heart connection with someone or something in this world. And often, they can't quite find it.

The characters all exist apart from the rest of the world. Many of them seem normal enough, but they are all damaged in some way. And that makes them different.

Unlike many authors, though, Murakami doesn't seem to say that this happens to everyone. He's not telling the reader that everyone feels this way. His main characters all have this in common, and that makes them extraordinary and special. And rarely do they get to experience true happiness.

Like with most collections of your favorite author's short stories, this collection will waiver between exemplars of her/his best and least favorite writings. The collection begins with an excerpt from the novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicles which, although one of my favorite reads from the author, doesn't mean that I wanted to see it again in this book. Then there's also the issue of never using names, of sometimes making significant events or stories around mundane objects or events, etc.

The translations are incredibly written. The real joy of these stories--besides their amazing accessibility--is the way that they read. The stories are meant for reading aloud and flow like poetry.

Great collection of stories. In each story, Murakami shows us a small slice of time in a character's life. Therefore, many don't have neat endings and there is often some interesting question that is left unanswered. But these stories are really about the characters themselves, loneliness being the common thread between them all. That may sound depressing, but Murakami's style is engaging and fun and the characters are very relatable. These stories will stick with you.

17 modern, magical, urbanic hilarious tales.
It's the first Murakami book I've read, and from now on I got addicted to his books. Murakami 's deadpan genius. King of the bizarre realm.
His stories take place in Japan, but could as well be everywhere else.
I found myself enthralled by the way he writes, captivated
To his ideas, fascinated by his way to see the unnatural in a so natural way.
The confusion of the young people in his stories is funny, touching and so familiar. Everything could happen; anything is for real if you can see it in your head. Everyone's normal, just the circumstances aren't...
It left me with the taste and desire for more! One by one I swallowed all of his other books.
I had never got disappointed from any of the others, but I found these short stories as the essence of all that I like about his books, and I keep reading it again and again.

I decided to pick this set of short stories after reading TV People, a short story featured in it, in an anthology. Murakami's writing style reminded me of Kafka, one of my favorite writers.

I certainly haven't regretted my decision one bit as reading these short stories provided hours of uninterrupted fun. In fact, I re-read some of them several times.

Murakami is at his best when he goes heavy on surrealism as is the case in Sleep and The Elephant Vanishes; stories that also happen to be the longest ones in this collection. The characters in them struggle mightily to make sense of the situations they find themselves in.

A woman in Sleep experiences a prolonged bout of insomnia which seems to energize her at first but then at the end leads her to a situation that's like a worst nightmare. In The Elephant Vanishes, a man has a bizarre explanation for an event that's very bizarre by itself; a zoo elephant that vanishes without a trace.

However, Murakami shines in stories with more mundane themes as well. Family Affair, a story that depicts an intricate relationship between a brother and a sister whose young lives are at crossroads, demonstrates his ability to delve deep into people's psyche and bring out all the nuances. The Silence is a good example of such a prowess too.

When I finished the book, I felt satisfied but also hungry for more. I definitely plan to tame that hunger in the near future by reading other Murakami's literary works.

There are 17 charming, funny and frequently puzzling short stories in "The Elephant Vanishes". Nearly all bear the author's particular style: a mixture of magical realism, feckless wandering and clean writing, often ending at a blank wall.
The 17 stories, very well translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin, show the author's wide range of reading and interests. The stories are set in Japan but they include references to Allen Ginsberg, Clarence Darrow, Candice Bergen, the "Colonel Bogey" March, Meryl Streep, W. Harper, Robert De Niro, "Anna Karenina," Sly and the Family Stone, Dustin Hoffman, and Katherine Mansfield.
A nice collection of stories which will charm all readers fond of the author's particular literary style.

This collection is one of Murakami's best. The stories are diverse but unified by an often whimsical absurdity. His voice is very different than the sullen whine of Western post-modernists. In fact, I don't consider Murakami a post-modernist at all. His writing is too concerned with the exuberance of living and the possibility of finding sense in a seemingly senseless world. His stories don't explicitly deliver "truth" but ring with the paradoxical clarity of a zen koan.

There is a cultured naiveté to his work that is entirely refreshing compared to the often exhausting, over-wrought prose of a Raymond Carver or an Anne Enright.

Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes" does not reveal its coherence until the title story finishes the 327th page. This is a discussion about the shifting perspectives of man and woman in traditional society. Once the man loomed larger than women, but, like the elephant and his trainer, this notion has vanished from view. Murakami pauses to acknowledge and ponder.
Many of the male characters in this collections of 17 short stories are stay-at-home husbands married to career-oriented wives. Whether house-sitting, working around the house, or tempted by younger women, these men deal with their sexual urges and emotions without help from traditional norms. Other characters explore their awakening sexual urges, sometimes destructively, other times formatively. The female characters are strong, confident, and often unsupportive and seductively teasing.
This collection is also a more than a less book. The narrative voice is verbose and unchecked. This is a selfish narration, typically masculine, oblivious of utility or artfulness. But it is also honest. The stories are full of tidbits of erudition, excessive detail, and, sometimes, usefulness. It is more tape recorded psychology project than vision.
However, culturally, the collection is sterile. it is not informative about Japanese norms and developments. Murakami's characters are typically middle-class, urban, cosmopolitan, and ordinary. This is not a sourcebook, to learn about Japanese attitudes, but a document chronicling the leveling effects of globalization. In many ways, it is as disturbing in its sterility as it is in its conclusions.

This book is a random collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami, translated by two people. Most people who read stories that have a definite plot (with a beginning and an end) might find the stories in this book slightly unnerving. The author does a great job of building up the plot to a climax and has an annoying tendency to just end it there or have the story eventually go nowhere. Almost none of his stories have a resolution or denouement.
A couple of the stories I liked are:
* The Perfect Girl
* Family Affair
* A Slow Boat to China (particularly the third section about the second chinese in)
* The Elephant Vanishes
<random thought>I find it curious that of the millions of names the author could have chosen for some of his characters, Noboru Watanabe is used twice.</random thought>
The other stories are just borderline fantasy and ramblings.
The translations are crisp, clear and colorfully written. I'm sure it does the author's original work justice. The author writes in the first person voice for all the stories. Sometimes, the protagonist is male, sometimes female. Most of the stories have the protagonist as a married person. Almost all of them come to a realization that their spouses aren't perfect and they hate them. None of the wives ever have a name. In the stories where the author writes in the voice of a bachelor, he always has a steady girlfriend and other acquaintances to have sex with. Every protagonist drinks beer and smokes. After a while all this repetition becomes boring and ultimately unpallatable.
LEAP rating (each out of 5):
============================
L (Language) - 4.5 (crisp, clear and colorfully translated)
E (Erotica) - 0.5 (first short story had the inklings of phone sex)
A (Action) - 0 (n/a)
P (Plot) - 1.5 (and that applies to about each short story)

It is rare to find an author who perfectly encapsulates in art one's perception of a place or time. Murakami does that for me with Japan, where I lived for 2 years. He portrays that strange country as utterly lacking in inspiration, brutally crushing to any spirit of individuality, and full of cruel and meaningless obligations imposed from above. It is, in my view, unerringly accurate and perceptive, while deeply sad as I knew many people like those here but who would never be capable of articulating their ennui. These stories perfectly blend mundane detail with horrific violence and nihilism, in a mother who decides she longer needs to sleep to a man who has quit his job as a legal clerk walking in his backyard. The reality behind these characters and scenes - so black and yet so apparently normal - are believable to anyone who has lived and worked in Japan, though certainly not to tourists or other casual observers. As such, I believe that Murakami has done for modern Japan what Balzac and Zola did for 19th C France: the quality is that high, as is the irony and humor that permeates his work. I loved it, but it takes a strong stomach.
Highly recommended.

Over the course of the last year or so, Murakami has propelled himself into the upper echelon of my taste in literature. I really love his work. The absolute confidence with which he writes his absurd yet profoundly beautiful novels has caused me to truly love sitting down to read one of his books for the first time.
There was no difference with this book. I absolutely loved this collection of stories. Normally I just read through a book and let whatever thoughts I have process and fade away with time. With this book I absolutely had to write down my thoughts. The stories in this book are brilliant.
The anonymity of the characters and surrealness of their settings are so great that they really grasp the essence of the purpose of the stories. His themes and metaphors are really poignant through his lack of other purpose in the stories. So stripped down and raw in physical story and purpose, yet so laden with internal dillema and character development, these stories are unique in such a way that only Murakami could have written them. Thus I love them.
If you're an avid reader of world literature or just like a good, odd story, this is the author for you, and in my opinion this is the place to start with him. I would even recommend reading a story out of this at the book store. While I have declared Haruki Murakami as one of my favorite authors, others may find his work a bit intellectually oppresive and because of this I think it's important, especially for a jaded american audience to get a little taste of what you're getting before you buy this. But definately try it out. You don't even know what you are missing.

Weird and stunning as it may seem, The Elephant Vanishes, resembling the author's other, longer fictions, is a constellation of short stories told in the mainstream way of contemporary literary writing: postmodernism.
This notion realized, it should thus be not difficult why the narrator and his wife in The Second Bakery Attack has to commit the illegal action, the purpose of which is other than money nor the hamburgers themselves. Their action symbolizes the author's rejection of and hostility to society, the prevalent social systems, wherein individuals are bound by inhumane rules, regulations, disciplines and the like. This component of a larger theme is also apparant, commonplace in other stories in the book as well as in other works of Haruki Murakami, in which the protagonists are often recluses or individualists consciously escaping the more collectivist activities and those common-minded, conforming people, who don't have deeper sense of what they are doing or what the world is.
Besides the attack of the modern, compressing society, the author situates his denial of modern rationalism in such sentimental stories as On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, The Elephant Vanishes and The Silence. Take the first said story as an example. The narrator meets on street a girl who is, as the story suggested, 100% perfect, and actually does also view the former the way as he does. Yet they end up passing from each other's sight forever even if they are perfectly liked by each other and in factuality, added the author on purpose, were lover long, long before. Why do they have to have such a sad ending? Is there any meaning beneath the design? The answer is positive. Though perfectly compatible, when they were still youths, they rationally made the decision, after a mutual contemplation of the seemingly rational wonder if "it(was)all right for one's dream to come true so easily", that they would break up to test if each other are perfect for each other, and if yes, it was strongly believed that they would marry after a destined re-meeting. They do see one day and feel the same as ever before for each other, in the end. But they have already forgotten everything past and therefore they made no actual attempt to strike up anything. If they had believed, the author seems to imply, in the their affections for each other instead in rationality, highly praised by prevailing modern societies, they would have made a perfect couple. Up to here, one should be able to understand Haruki Murakami's idea: trust your feeling instead of blind rationality. Which many postmodernist thinkers(e.g. Michelle Foucault)have suggested.
Perhaps the utmost topic, and element of postmodernism is the idea about on truth. And it is surely one the author does not leave aside. Rather, the challenge of absolute truth is omnipresent in the book, not to mention others. The person self-claimed but never proved to be a barn burner in Barn Burning, the mother of the narrator's friend who suddenly broke away from her family during a trip overseas, persons or person-like beings in 'TV People' and in 'The Dancing Dwarf', these are all not people out of one's normal imagination with unbelievable stories. The core of the matter is, the author seems to tell the surrealist stories in realism or semi-realism. Like most postmodernist writers, Haruki Murakami presents us a world with reality and hallucination both masked by each other. It is a skilled denial of one-sided, absolute truth, no doubt.
Not to mention his insistence of antagonism of brain-lazy, "self-satisfied", and phony people, and other relatively small-scaled sub-themes, Haruki Murakami proves, mainly with his charming stories and sentimental lyricisms, to be a outstanding writer who lingers in the main themes of postmodernism in a postmodern era, which persists to this day.
Readers of this are welcome to discuss Haruki Murakami's works via e-mail with me. More than welcome are counter-arguments, to note.

Unfortunately short story collections too often seem the bastardized relatives of novels and I so seldom see them appear on any award or reading lists. Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes is a prime example of how perfect and well crafted short stories can be. His stories tend to follow the lives of the upper/middle class and a certain emotional distance or ambiguity and here and there an element will connect one story with a previous story. This perhaps was the first book that I couldn't wait to finish because I was so exhilarated to read it again. My favorite story in the collection (read it even if it's only in passing): "The Second Bakery Attack."

Murakami's short stories all share a mood of serene surrealism, sort of like a Jeunet movie. Perhaps surprisingly the stories seem less "Japanese" (aside from their Tokyo backdrops) than those of several ex-pats, including Kerri Sakamoto who lives in Toronto. Some of the stories are a little self-consciously quirky (the Jonathan Lethem disease) and none of them really implant any long-term images in the reader's mind. They tend to evaporate into insubstantiality the minute you finish reading them.

Still, they have the pleasant mouth-feel of a high-quality Riesling.

Although I'm generally not a fan of his other works, I enjoyed his ability to create suspense in this volume. The surreality in many of the pieces worked for me -- perhaps no better than in "TV People" - and I found myself stopping in places to 1) better understand what is happening to the characters and 2) to better understand what the author is seeking to create. This is a great collection.

The first story in Murakami's brilliant short story collection is one of the best in this incredible display of ingenuity. These stories with their Western/Japanese cultural mix still manage to cut to the core of our deepest emotions and experiences. Murakami is definitely different, but it's worth reading his whole oevre starting with these stories because many of his larger symbolic and thematic ideas stem from here. By the time you graduate to the Wind up Bird Chronicle, you'll feel like you have a better grip on how Murakami thinks and explores complex relationships.

I guess the rule of thumb here is to assume that all things coming from Japan are weird, which is true in this case. The Elephant Vanishes is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read, but that's not to say that I didn't like it. The short stories striked me as original pieces of work that are surprisingly deep. I can't summarize to you the stories; even if I could, the point of the whole book would be lost. If you're a person who likes surreal and strange little tales, I highly recommend this collection.

Unfortunately short story collections too often seem the bastardized relatives of novels and I so seldom see them appear on any award or reading lists. Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes is a prime example of how perfect and well crafted short stories can be. His stories tend to follow the lives of the upper/middle class and a certain emotional distance or ambiguity and here and there an element will connect one story with a previous story. This perhaps was the first book that I couldn't wait to finish because I was so exhilarated to read it again. My favorite story in the collection (read it even if it's only in passing): "The Second Bakery Attack."

Murakami's short stories all share a mood of serene surrealism, sort of like a Jeunet movie. Perhaps surprisingly the stories seem less "Japanese" (aside from their Tokyo backdrops) than those of several ex-pats, including Kerri Sakamoto who lives in Toronto. Some of the stories are a little self-consciously quirky (the Jonathan Lethem disease) and none of them really implant any long-term images in the reader's mind. They tend to evaporate into insubstantiality the minute you finish reading them.

Still, they have the pleasant mouth-feel of a high-quality Riesling.

Although I'm generally not a fan of his other works, I enjoyed his ability to create suspense in this volume. The surreality in many of the pieces worked for me -- perhaps no better than in "TV People" - and I found myself stopping in places to 1) better understand what is happening to the characters and 2) to better understand what the author is seeking to create. This is a great collection.

The first story in Murakami's brilliant short story collection is one of the best in this incredible display of ingenuity. These stories with their Western/Japanese cultural mix still manage to cut to the core of our deepest emotions and experiences. Murakami is definitely different, but it's worth reading his whole oevre starting with these stories because many of his larger symbolic and thematic ideas stem from here. By the time you graduate to the Wind up Bird Chronicle, you'll feel like you have a better grip on how Murakami thinks and explores complex relationships.

I guess the rule of thumb here is to assume that all things coming from Japan are weird, which is true in this case. The Elephant Vanishes is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read, but that's not to say that I didn't like it. The short stories striked me as original pieces of work that are surprisingly deep. I can't summarize to you the stories; even if I could, the point of the whole book would be lost. If you're a person who likes surreal and strange little tales, I highly recommend this collection.

Collections of short stories are often hit-and-miss affairs, and Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes is no exception. It contains both very memorable and rather forgettable stories. All of them have the Haruki Murakami surreal touch; modern Tokyo on drugs (if you will). Unfortunately the lead character in all his stories seem oddly the same, probably a thinly disguised version of Murakami himself.
Bottom line: no, not as good as his brilliant The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. But certainly decent. Murakami fans will rejoice.

This collection of short stories was fun and interesting to read. They are Murakami at his best. If you are already a fan, or if you just want to try something different, read these stories. You will enjoy them.

Reading Murakami is just plain fun. The characters in Murakami`s stories live ordinary lives which somehow become twisted and extraordinary. In the short story anthology The Elephant Vanishes, a man`s favorite elephant disappears into thin air and the balance of his whole life is upset. In Sleep, a woman is startled by a strange man in her sleep and suffers a subsequent case of wakefulness with moments of animated consciousness and unimaginable horror. Seemingly mundane conversations between characters can bring bittersweet nostalgia to the reader.

I've read several of Murakami's novels, and all of his other short story collections, but I keep coming back to this one as his most inspired work. I especially was captivated by the psychological fantasy in such stories as The Dancing Dwarf. Now I've got to get back to the elephant factory.

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York, 1993, 327 pp., $21. (hardbound)
Haruki Murakami achieved, in his first collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes, a rare and delightful mingling of universal motifs emanating from a Japanese perspective. His popularity in America is probably best understood because of his refreshing simplicity, yet complex pragmatism, sometimes odd to the occidental mind, which permeates his stories. The book contains fifteen stories, and both Playboy and The New Yorker have published some of them. The tone and narration of the stories have a distinct yet similar quality to one another and portray honor, courage, death, insanity, and love with precise, yet foreign, perspectives.
While the settings for his stories are decidedly urban and Asian, he seems quite at home with Western culture. He includes spaghetti dinners, Mozart, Macdonald's, and Herbie Hancock seemingly in one long melding together of a smorgasbord of Western icons.
His ability to empathize with people , feelings, and concepts, in spite of the narrator's apparent confusion about life, brings to mind the old Peter Faulk character, Columbo.
His search for meaning in darkness, such as in the story "Sleep" which has a young mother struggling with extreme insomnia and the subsequent questions that arise, concerning the meaning of love, marriage, offspring and mortality point to the out of balance nature of a mind that has not rested.
The paranoia and brittle makeup of sanity as exhibited in his story "The Second Bakery Attack" exemplifies Murakami's simplicity. His young married couple holdup a McDonald's for 30 Big Macs in order to free themselves of a curse.
In the "Barn Burning" he has a man recklessly confessing to burning barns in order to keep himself balanced.
Ultimately, when attempting to arrive at the meaning of the concepts behind the words we read, (or write), we have to ask ourselves about the perspective the narrator has assumed. It is in the nature of Murakami's character's perspectives that we catch glimpses of Murakami. We readers who are American, are intrigued and mystified by those glimpses.(SP

Murakami is a writer that you either love or hate. For me, reading his work is encountering an almost perfect story. He engages the reader in a new world, full of magic realism, humor and a strange unsettling darkness. The short stories in this collection stay with you years after initial reading. If you don't enjoy The Elephant Vanishes, chances are you will not appreciate his novels. This is a wonderful introduction to the addictive world of this great author.

I'm a big fan of Murakami's, but I love his short stories much better than his novels. it is the book you have to read to feel great to live on this planet with Murakami.some people say he is too American and his stories dont make any sense. why does a story have to make a sense? this life doesnt make any sense sometimes. I think his cute, little but deep and touching stories can touch your soul.They are strange, but beatiful. In some stories it is impossible to happen in your life time. but we can dream and imagine whatever we want. Call him a dreamer, and sentimentalist, but so are you.

After reading a number of Murakami novels, I find this collection of short stories to be a refreshing change of pace. The stories still possess a magical quality that is uniquely Murakami, but it has a more satisfying feel to all the stories. They don't all necessarily make much sense, but I loved immersing myself totally in the stories. I will definitely read them again in the future!

These short stories are gripping, I could hardly put the book down. They are nonsensical, but in a perfectly reasonable way, life is very odd, and in this way Murakami's work is reflective of our times. If you read Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and not this, then don't be surprised that the first short story is pretty much the first chapter of that novel.

Some of the short stories in this book are insightful, while others are surreal. These stories touch on themes involving relationships, fate, and our own self-image. Give that these stories are translated from Japanese, it is interesting to see how familiar the characters and the settings feel. Is this a reflection of the homogenization of cultures, or is it a reminder that we really are more similar than our cultural differences suggest? These stories have many layers of meaning that can be used for analysis.

Murakami's writing has a surreal quality. This collection of stories was like wandering through a series of seductive dream landscapes. Originally styled.

- C.A.Wulff, author of Born Without a Tail

I got it for my husband but then picked it up to just scan it through myself. And then I was hooked after reading the first pages on when a woman calls while the voice is (over)cooking the pasta. I can certainly recommend it for a nice warm feeling of the magic in everyday life.

Perhaps it is because this is a compilation of earlier works, or perhaps because the scope of short stories is limiting, I found myself a little disappointed with this book. While I am without a doubt a Murakami fan (I absolutely loved A Wild Sheep Chase; Dance, Dance, Dance; Hardboiled Wonderland; and Kafka on the Shore), I found the stories here lacked the complexity that I have come to enjoy from Murakami. I did enjoy some of the stories here, but, over all, I found the book a little lacking in depth.

I have read a good deal of Murakami now and this was not his best. however while reading it i realized that how the translation is done makes a huge difference. this book has a different translator for each story. for novice Murakami readers i reccomend Kafka on The Shore and The Wind up bird chronicles.

If you get a chance to read this, don't. I listened to the audio version of the book and had to force myself to finish it because it was a selection of my book club. I kept hoping there might be some thread cleverly connecting the stories, but except for the character of Noboru Watanabe, who showed up in different guises in a few stories, that thread never materialized. Many of the stories seemed like so much navel-gazing, letting us in on the private thoughts of unremarkable people. While I, too, might have thoughts such as "Do bugs get cold?" I hardly consider them the stuff of literature. It's not that the quality of the writing itself was bad. Rather, the stories were boring and pointless.

There were so many stories that I simply couldn't bring myself to read every single one. But I've read most of them and my favorite story is the one with the boy and the girl 100% perfect for each other.

I really enjoyed this book. Mainly because of the various feelings u get when reading. U'll just have to read it. I also like how the stories are very condense, it doesnt get boring.
Im personally a big fan of Haruki Murakami. And i have read
Norwegian Wood
Wind up Bird (have at least some 60 pages left, very long novel)
South of the Border
Sputnik Wood (only few chapters because it was bore to read)
*****A person asked why Notobu Watanabe is used two times in the stories. This is because the author is describing the life of one of his characters found in Wind Up Bird, also named Notobu Watanabe. And i find it very good that he included the same character in Elephant Vanishes.
In 'Wind up Bird' Notobu was portrayed as a dull but evil person. hahhahahha--it was very funny that he was in the Elephant Vanish short story.
I will prefer u read Wind up bird before Ele vanish...because some of the stories will have much stronger effect.
I started out with Norwegian Wood. And im not 12 years old.
kenchi1983

Hate beautiful, meaningful, flowing prose? Collect books simply to parade an empty, pseudo-intellectual facade? Yet another clumsy pastiche of stilted writing, meandering plots, and truly stupid dialogue from the poster-boy of the Conspicuous Hinty-lect-chales' Club. Sure to delight any yokel short on brains but long on pretensions.