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The Elephant Vanishes
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The Elephant Vanishes (1993) (edit title/settings)

Stories

by Haruki Murakami (Author) (edit contributors)

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These are beautifully written stories, often funny, always moving."--Chicago Tribune With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this... read more

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A collection of 15 of Haruki Murakami’s most surreal short stories.

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  • “One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighbourhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either – must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl – one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.”
  • “Women are like salmon: In the end, they all swim to the same place. (p. 173) "Family Affair"”
  • “Superlative it was not. But perfect, yes.”
  • “To them, the air vibrates, therefore I am.”
  • “A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think.”
  • “What the hell, I tell myself, what do I care about understanding some strange woman's FEELINGS, anyway? What possible good could come from it?”
  • “so then, what was this life of mine? I was being consumed by my tendencies and then sleeping to repair the damage. My life was nothing but a repetition of this cycle. It was going nowhere....I don't need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I'm keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don't want to be "repaired". I will not sleep.”
  • “The best thing to do with a hypothesis is to let it run any course it pleases.”
  • “oh, well, everything-everybody-gets out of wack once or twice a month. That's life.”
  • “Though the terror was leaving me, the trembling of my body wouldn't stop. It was in my skin, like the circular ripples on water after an earthquake. I could see the slight squivering.”
  • “All I had to do was to break the connection between my mind and my body. While my body went about its business, my mind floated in its own inner space.”
  • “After I gave up sleeping, it occured to me what a simple thing reality s, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. ..Like running a simple machine. Once you learn how to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.”
  • “....my mind was someplace a hundred years-and a hundred miles-from reality. No matter how machanically I worked, no matter how little love or emotion I invested in my handling of reality...”
  • “...but all existed for me inside was a wakeful darkness.”
  • “They wouldn't believe me. Or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no idea what I'm feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive worldview.”
  • “Outside in the absence of sound, the trees squirmed like dogs with an uncontrollable itch.”
  • “we're all human, after all, and everybody's got something a little off somewhere.”
  • “It was as of a lifeline had snapped in a seizure. After which a vast an empty silence , warmthless as overbleached underwear, was all that remained.”
  • “Only, she's driven-and very likely the spirit attached to that body-craves after vigorous activity, relentless as a comet.”
  • “Each experience called forth emotions that had been slumbering in her, untouched and unused.”
  • “She cried for two hours straight, never moving. I could hardly believe the body was capable of producing such quantities of tears.”
  • “Now thanks to you, my house is equipped with a soldering iron. But because of that damned soldering iron, my house doesn't feel like my house anymore.”
  • “I seem to lose the power of speech on half-moon nights.”
  • “What a strange world we live in! All I want is a perfectly ordinary hamburger steak, and the only way I can have it is at this particular point in time is Hawaiian-style without pineapple.”
  • “I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.”
  • “We ate our hamburger steak and drank coffee, feeling much like two would-be passengers who had missed the same train.”
  • “All I can do is look up from the train at the windows in the buildings that might be hers. Every one of them could be her window, it sometimes seems to me, and at the other times I think that none of them could be hers. There are simply too many of them.”
  • “I don't like Sunday evenings. Or, Rather, I don't like everythings that goes with them-that Sunday- evening state of affairs. Without fail, come Sunday evening my head starts to ache. In varying intensity each time.”
  • “Like melancholy moods, or the secretive, quiet fall of rain, they steal into the gloom of the appointed time.”
  • “I met her at the end of septmber. It had been raining that day from morning to night- the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of the year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean.”
  • “You can play games with it, make up neat expressions: "essentially pragmatic", or "pragmatic in essence". If you look at things that way, you can avoid all kind of complicated problems.”
  • “she was married, and so was I. She was twenty-six, and I was thirty-one. she wore contact/lenses, and I wore glasses. she praised my necktie, and I praised her jacket. we compared rents and complained about our jobs and salaries. In other words, we were beginning to like each other.”
  • “I could see that the ice had melted and that the water was working its way through the cocktail like a tiny ocean current.”
  • “It seemed to me, too, that the elephant and the keeper were gladly giving themselves over to this new order that was trying to envelop them- or that had already partially succedeed in enveloping them.”
  • “I continue to sell refrigerators and toasters and coffee-makers in the pragmatic world, based on the afterimages of memories I retain from that world. The more pragmatic I try to become, the more succesfully I sell and the more people I succeed in selling myself to. That's probably because people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function.”
  • “The important thing is to get deep down into it. That-at least to me- is boxing. When I'm in a match, I feel like I'm at the bottom of a deep, deep hole. So far inside I can;t see anyone and no one can see me. Way down there in the darkness, doing battle. All alone. But not sad alone.”
  • “With Aoki, though, whatever the guy did he was like a swan in a sea of mud.”
  • “What I should have done was laugh and let it go. But a junior-high-school kid doesn't have that kind of cool.”
  • “Some people don't grow, and they don't degenerate; they keep being exactly as they always were.”
  • “I must have looked terrible, short on sleep, a neurotic wreck.”
  • “There existed crwatures so lacking in human depth. Not that I'm such a deep guy, but at least I know a real human being when I see one. But this kind, no. His life was as a flat as a piece of slate. It was all surface, no matter what he did. He was nothing.”
  • “"People who got through a heavy experience like that are changed men, like it or not. They change for the better and they change for the worse. On the good side, they become unshakable.”
  • “He broke off and looked out the window to the clouds. They'd barely moved. A heavy lid, bearing down from the heavens. Absorbing all color from the control tower and airplanes and ground-trasport vehicles and tarnac and men in uniform.”
  • “..or like perspective demos. Figures that look far away even close up.”
  • “The way my Sunday afternoons go, I end up doing a little bit of various things, none very well. It's a struggle to concentrate on any one thing. This particular day, everything seems to be going right. I think, today I'll read this book, listen to those records, answer these letters. Today, for sure, I'll clean out my desk drawers, run errands, wash the car for once. But two o'clock comes on, and all my plans are blown. I haven't done a thing; I've been lying around on the sofa the whole day, same as always. The clock ticks in my ear. The sound erodes everything around me, little by little, like dripping rain. Little by little, Sunday afternoon wears down, shrinking in scale.”
  • “I read books- I hardly read magazines; <ersonally, I wouldn't mind if every last magazine in the world went out of business.”
  • “My world may be crumbling, out of balance, but is that a reason to ring up in her office?”
  • “In spite of which, I persist with my labors. Doggedly expanding the dig, filling out the picture with every last new find. Shards of memory.”
  • “If birds in flight go unburdened by names, let my memories be free of dates.”
  • “I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own experiences account interchanges with somebody else's.”
  • “I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not. – The Second Bakery Attack”
  • “The meat patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots, sizzling. The sweet smell of grilling meat burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm of microscopic bugs, dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest corners, then massing together inside my hermetically sealed huger cavern, clinging to its pink walls. – The Second Bakery Attack”
  • “Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and—what I’d really like to do—explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world. - On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”
  • “Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% perfect boy for me. – On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”
  • “I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. – Sleep”
  • “Where had the old me gone, the one who used to read a book as if possessed by it? What had those days—and that almost abnormally intense passion—meant to me? – Sleep”
  • “Now it was mine, just mine, nobody else’s, all mine. I could use this time in any way I liked. No one would get in my way. No one would make demands on me. Yes, that was it. I had expanded my life. I had increased it by a third. – Sleep.”
  • “Just this, and even next week I’d be able to reconstruct what went on today. Precisely because of this meticulous system of mine, I have managed to keep a diary for twenty-two years without missing a day. To every meaningful act, its own system. Whether the wind blows or not, that’s the way I live. – The Fall of the Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and The Realm of Raging Winds”
  • “They all tried to stop me, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. And think of the courage that it took, please, took. What if you thought it was rude and presumptuous, for a creature like me to propose to you? – The Little Green Monster”
  • “But it is rude and presumptuous, I said in my mind. What a rude little creature you are to come seeking my love! – The Little Green Monster”
  • “You crawled out of my garden. You unlocked my door without permission. You came inside my house. I never asked you here. I have the right to think anything I want to. – The Little Green Monster”
  • “See, then, you little monster, you have no idea what a woman is. There’s no end to the number of things I can think of to do to you. – The Little Green Monster”
  • “You can look all you want, but you can’t say a thing. You can’t do a thing. Your existence is over, finished, done. Soon the eyes dissolved into emptiness, and the room filled with the darkness of night. – The Little Green Monster”
  • “Where were we headed? I wondered. But I was far too tired to think very deeply about such things. When I closed my eyes, sleep floated down on me like a dark silent net. – Family Affair”
  • “My world may be crumbling, out of balance, but is that a reason to ring up her office? What can I say about all this, anyway? – TV People”
  • “I gave myself to the dance, and all the while I could hear distinctly the transit of the stars, the shifting of the tides, the racing of the wind. This was truly what it meant to dance. I stamped my feet, swung my arms, tossed my head, and whirled. A globe of white light burst open inside my head as I spun round and round. – The Dancing Dwarf”
  • “If you could get to the bottom of the depth, losing doesn’t matter—nothing can hurt you. And anyway, nobody can win at everything; somebody’s got to lose. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • “All he knew was that he hated his guts from the moment he set eyes on him. It was the first time in his life he despised anyone. – The Silence”
  • “In almost every way, Aoki and I were polar opposites. I was a quiet kid and didn’t stand out in class. I was happy to be left alone. Sure, I had friends, but no real friends for life. Ina a sense, maybe I was too mature too soon. Instead of hanging around with my classmates, I kept to myself. I read books or listened to my father’s classical records or went to the gym to hear the older guys talk. I wasn’t much to look at. My grades weren’t so bad, but they weren’t so hot. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • “Jerks like him deserved to get punched out. He was a worm, and worms get stepped on. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • “So I thought the whole affair would fade away like some bad memory. But it wasn’t so simple. Seems Aoki was lying in wait to get his revenge. Waiting for the right moment to cut everything out from under me. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • “It’s too easy to let yourself get ground down by those who give you shit. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • “I mean, it’s impossible, in my own mind, to believe in people. I don’t hate people, and I haven’t lost my faith in humanity. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • “People like Aoki don’t scare me. They’re all over the place, but I don’t trouble myself with them anymore. When I run into them, I don’t get involved. I see them coming and I head the other way. I can spot them in an instant. But at the same time, I’ve got to admire the Aokis of this world. Their ability to lay low until the right moment, their knack for latching on to opportunities, their skill in fucking with people’s minds—that’s no ordinary talent. I hate their kind so much it makes me want to puke, but it is a talent. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • “No, what really scares me is how easily, how uncritically, people will believe the crap that slime like Aoki deal out. How these Aoki types produce nothing themselves, don’t have an idea in the world, and talk so nice, how this slime can sway gullible types to any opinion and get them to perform on cue, as a group. And this group never entertains even a sliver of doubt that they could be wrong. They think nothing of hurting someone, senselessly, permanently. They don’t take any responsibility for their actions. Them. They’re the real monsters. – The Silence”
    Ozawa
  • ““We still have time—how about a beer?” he said after a while. Yeah, let’s, I said. We probably both could use one.”
  • “And so a year went by. Then, without warning, the elephant vanished. – The Elephant Vanishes”
  • “I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean. – The Elephant Vanishes”
  • “That was the last time I saw her. We talked once on the phone after that, about some details in her tie-in article. While we spoke, I thought seriously about inviting her out for dinner, but I ended up not doing it. It just didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. – The Elephant Vanishes”
  • “The elephant and keeper have vanished completely. They will never be coming back. – The Elephant Vanishes”
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Setting & Locations edit see section history

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First Sentence edit see section history

I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghettie when the woman calls.

Table of Contents edit see section history

The Wind Up Bird and Tuesday's Women

The Second Bakery Attack

The Kangaroo Communique

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

Glossary edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Haruki Murakami (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Alfred Birnbaum (Translator)
  2. Jay Rubin (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Country: USA
Publication Date: 1993
ISBN: 0679420576
Page Count: 327

Classification edit see section history

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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