The Dancing Dwarf Murakami Pdf

Isn't it weird how both Murakami and David Lynch came up with the image of dancing dwarves in dreams for their respective works? My first thought was that Lynch had read Murakami prior to writing Twin Peaks (since the short story was published in 1984 before being collected in The Elephant Vanishes in 1993) but maybe they could have come up with similar dream imagery, like they both tapped. Alternate cover edition of ISBN 536 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 collection of stories a determined assault on the normal.A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a. Isn't it weird how both Murakami and David Lynch came up with the image of dancing dwarves in dreams for their respective works? My first thought was that Lynch had read Murakami prior to writing Twin Peaks (since the short story was published in 1984 before being collected in The Elephant Vanishes in 1993) but maybe they could have come up with similar dream imagery, like they both tapped. This is English-Japanese bilingual reading of Haruki Murakami. The dancing dwarf murakami pdf. THE ELEPHANT VANISHES by Haruki Murakami. Green Monster,' 'TV People,' 'The Dancing Dwarf,' and 'The. Book Review - THE ELEPHANT VANISHES. The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of mylungs. Down in my loins, I felt a dull need to come. Clamping my eyes closed, I fought it.

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The Elephant Vanishes, by Haruki Murakami

Copyright © by Brent Peterson, 4/9/06

I first encountered Haruki Murakami through his Norwegian Wood, the novel that made him a household name in Japan. I found that book to be memorably well-written: subtle and precise, affecting without drifting into sentimentality. There was a kind of strangeness to certain scenes, but it wasn't overdone. The characters were believable, and Murakami wasn't straining to be deep where the material didn't warrant it. There were unexpected but perfectly believable developments like the college-age narrator sleeping with his girlfriend's middle-aged friend after the girlfriend's suicide, as a form of mutual comfort. I felt like Murakami was someone I wanted to read more of, but I didn't get the chance until now.

But the Haruki Murakami I encountered in the pages of The Elephant Vanishes, translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, seemed to be a completely different writer - and, unfortunate to say, in most cases a markedly inferior one.

For one thing, there's a kind of intentional blandness to the tone and setting. The protagonists in these stories are usually urban and suburban middle-class husbands and wives in their late 20's and early 30's, who do routine middle-class things like make spaghetti, listen to classical music (almost every other story has a reference to a classical composer), and feel a vague tension and distance while around their spouses. Much can be done with these mainstays, but Murakami drones, describing each fold of laundry, each trip for groceries. The quotidian details could be sketched rather than enumerated, and they enact the fallacy that banal existence requires equally banal writing.

So to make things 'interesting', Murakami inserts, well, random crap - I suppose his apologists would classify these intrusions into the mundane as 'surreal' or 'magic realist', but surrealism and absurdity result from precise spirals of logic leading to irrational but somehow appropriate conclusions; when implausible things have no cause, explanation, or purpose, there is no tension because anything can happen.

Consider 'The Second Bakery Attack', in which a husband and wife, suddenly overcome by an unearthly hunger, drive to a McDonald's early in the morning with a shotgun and demand food. Now, this is an example - one of many in The Elephant Vanishes - in which, having conceived a potentially rewarding idea, Murakami botches its execution.

For example, if the husband and wife were poor enough to actually need to hold up a McDonald's, there could be real tension and interest to this premise. But in the story, their hunger and eventual action result from a kind of curse hanging over the marriage, resulting from an earlier 'bakery attack' in which the husband and his friend held up a bakery to get a week's worth of bread. (not because they needed to, they just didn't want to work - the unexamined middle-classness remains firmly in place). Tellingly, both 'attacks' aren't seen as particularly stupid or unnecessary - the logic Murakami provides seems to be that a second attack was required to complete or finish the first. Once the couple have stuffed themselves with Big Macs, the curse - and the story - end.

Again, think of all the ways this story could have gone right. All the possibilities of a couple holding up a McDonald's for food - them actually having reasonable motivations, other customers in the place getting involved (Murakami completely whiffs on this one, the only other customers are a sleeping couple) are bypassed. Everything goes off without a hitch; there's no tension, no suspense, no point. Now, again, you might be asking 'But does there need to be?' In answer to that, let's look at the actual level of writing and plot-construction and see how Murakami fares. Once the narrator has told his wife about the first attack, she insists they complete a second one. Murakami then describes them riding in their car, 'stretched out on the back seat, long and stiff as a dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun.' Why this couple would have a shotgun in a country with gun laws as strict as Japan is never explained, but certainly strains the already attenuated credibility. Murakami passes this off with:

'Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had 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.'

This is not surrealism, magic realism, or absurdity. This is Murakami trying to joke off his laziness. Clearly, Murakami had the idea that 'It'd be cool if a couple held up a McDonald's,' but he couldn't be bothered to craft a convincing scenario. The above lines could work in the context of pure farce, but Murakami is going for something portentous, tossing in, in the same story, anecdotes about Wagner changing the protagonist's life and a menacing subconscious image of a volcano protruding from beneath the sea. What any of this means is beside the point - in nearly every story, Murakami evades resolution and passes everything off with a few rhetorical and leading questions - the old 'What did it all mean? I couldn't tell. What does anything mean? Isn't it funny being alive...' trick.

In 'The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women', the protagonist receives mysterious phone-calls from a woman claiming to know him and demanding he come to 'an understanding of our feelings.' The phone-calls take a turn for the pornographic, while the protagonist's wife sends him on a mission to find their missing cat. En route, he encounters a teenage girl who lectures him on death. There is some mild flirtation between them, but nothing comes of it. The protagonist returns home without having found the cat, and when his wife returns, she accuses him of killing the cat through negligence. End of story.

Now - here's the catch - there is actually a Murakami novel called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. From what I can tell, 'The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women' is the first chapter. Well...okay. It might work as a first chapter. But it manifestly does not work as a stand-alone short story. I can think of no reason why this was included (as the first story in the book, much less) other than to get the reader to have to fork up more money for the novel to find out what happens. Weak, weak stuff.

Taken from the same story, this is how Murakami thinks sixteen year old girls talk out loud:

'I think about what it would be like to cut the thing open with a scalpel. Not the corpse. That lump of death itself. There's got to be something like that in there somewhere, I just know it. Dull like a softball - and pliable - a paralyzed tangle of nerves. I'd like to remove it from the dead body and cut it open. I'm always thinking about it. Imagining what it'd be like inside.'

Real-life conversation can, of course, take turns for the bizarre. But the story fails completely to capture this happening.

In 'The Kangaroo Communique', a product control clerk sends a long, rambling tape to a woman whose complaint form sexually aroused him. The message, or 'communique' has no real structure, and is full of - again - random crap. Murakami tries to get all deep, rambling about the life-cycle of kangaroos and 'the Nobility of Imperfection', but the story itself is so disjointed, ill-written, and vaguely unwholesome (the clerk, although apparently meant to be funny or moving, is only creepy in his attempts to come onto the writer of the complaint form) that whatever insights were intended are completely lost. Even if the entire story is only intended to be the mental ejaculations of a madman, it still doesn't contain enough to warrant even a cursory reading.

In 'The Little Green Monster', the eponymous creature (a kappa, perhaps) burrows through a woman's garden and breaks into her house, confessing its love for her. The woman kills the monster by imagining herself torturing it. End of story.

Murakami tries very hard to come up with something like the prose equivalent of Twin Peaks, without much luck. Rather than suggest worlds of darkness and mystery beneath the surface, his 'odd' stories, while striving not to 'conclude' anything, nevertheless miss the mark of suggestive understatement - usually, this results from Murakami failing to connect his conceits with sympathetic characters. The protagonists are usually too generic for it to matter when Murakami tries to skew the mundane rhythm of their lives.

The most frustrating thing, though, is that The Elephant Vanishes isn't completely bad. At times, the Murakami of Norwegian Wood manages to break through, the one attuned to loneliness and detail and the actual randomness of life. It seems that in short stories, Murakami is best when he sticks to brief, nice ideas and doesn't try to stretch them to depths they can't support. This happens when he restrains himself, when he forces himself to deal with human emotion and not merely dick around with his fabulist conceits. Throughout the unsuccessful stories, there is no especial joy in any of the language, no sense of urgency that would make the bizarre elements exciting. It's only when he narrows his focus, stops showing off, and reaches for the real that his writing succeeds.

'On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,' about what happens after you randomly meet your perfect partner on the street, is a success at only five pages. The story is little more than a conceit, but Murakami doesn't try to piss all over it with trite ruminations, and as such, it stands out nicely.

In 'Family Affair,' the protagonist is pushing thirty but still living with his sister, who is on the verge of marrying a man the protagonist finds boring. This story is nice - nothing remarkable, but well written and believable. True, the characters learn 'lessons' at the end, but the tone isn't unbearable and there's no evidence of dramatic life-change - just the gradual adjustments people make to accomodate other personality types.

'The Window', a story of the loneliness of a woman who joins a letter-writing society just to have someone she can unfold her feelings to, is another success. Here's the ending, after the protagonist, who corresponded with the woman, visits her apartment while her husband is away, sharing a brief connection with her:

'Should I have slept with her?
That's the central question of this piece.
The answer is beyond me. Even now, I have no idea. There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate. [italics mine] 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 other times I think none of them could be hers. There are simply too many of them.'

Even though the italicized sentence is a cliche and could easily have been deleted, the last line is effective, implying that not only are there too many windows, but there are too many lonely people - a reality Murakami could apply himself to more rigorously if he gave up on the dancing dwarves and little green monsters.

The most interesting story is 'Sleep', in which a housewife, suffering from insomnia that leaves her with full energy, finds time for herself after her family has gone to sleep. Although she is initially troubled, the woman's sleeplessness is a catalyst for liberation, in that, finally given enough free time to indulge her passions for Russian literature and swimming, she comes to resent the blandness of her husband and son. The emotions generated here are more palpable and unsettling than anything else in the collection, and I got the sense Murakami might actually pull off something awesome - but, tellingly, the ending completely fails to resolve anything, or even offer a glimpse of some future development or revelation. All we get is some incredibly cliched rambling about the unknowability of death, and then the woman's car being attacked in the night by strangers. Having thrown some interesting balls up in the air, Murakami shows that he doesn't know how to catch them with any reliability. Let's look at some of this:

'Perhaps death was a state entirely unlike sleep, something that belonged to a different category altogether - like the deep, endless, wakeful darkness I was seeing now.
No, that would be too terrible. If the state of death was not to be a rest for us, then what was going to redeem this imperfect life of ours, so fraught with exhaustion? Finally, though, no one knows what death is. Who has ever truly seen it? No one. Except the ones who are dead. No one living knows what death is like. They can only guess. And the best guess is still a guess. Maybe death is a kind of rest, but reasoning can't tell us that. The only way to find out what death is is to die. Death can be anything at all.'

Even given the possibility of a bad translation, this simply isn't good writing. It's teenage angst, unoriginal and not particularly well-phrased. The same thing happens in most of the other stories. Having conceived an interesting idea, Murakami merely describes it, sometimes tacks on some cliched sentiments, and ends. Repeat. Halfway through the book, I was simply tired. Here's the narrator of 'The Last Lawn of the Afternoon,' on writing:

'And then to put these things out as saleable items, you call them finished products - at times it's downright embarassing just to think of it. Honestly, it can make me blush. And if my face turns that shade, you can be sure everyone's blushing.'

Sadly, this is pretty much correct. The control isn't there. For most of this book, Murakami is just noodling. There were times during The Elephant Vanishes when I was very, very embarassed for you, Haruki.

Postscript: Blurbs

As usual, this got blurbed with a bunch of nonsense that has nothing to do with Murakami's writing in general, much less the actual contents of the book. Taken from the front and back covers:

1) 'A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of the contemporary heart and head.' - Jay McInerney

Generic nonsense - completely meaningless.

2) 'How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions? I am weak-kneed with admiration.' - Independent on Sunday

He doesn't make poetry. None of his prose can really be considered 'poetic', even in the broadest, most baseless descriptive sense. Even in the total effect of his best stories, they aren't particularly poetic, just realistic and recognizeable. It's nothing to get weak-kneed about.

3) 'These stories show us Japan as it's experienced from the inside...Even in the slipperiest of Mr. Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out warm with life.' -New York Times

Whoever wrote this knows nothing about Japan and probably didn't bother to read Murakami, either. None of these stories really describes a recognizeable Japan, not just because Murakami often detaches from reality (and quality) completely, but because he's too busy fellating the West (he never stops namedropping Western music a baby-boomer would find cool, while current j-rock gets a single dismissive paragraph) to really deal with anything like contemporary Japanese social issues. Not that there's any real necessity to do that - just saying he doesn't, is all. There's no sense of 'Japan from the inside' - if the names were changed, all the stories could easily take place somewhere else.

4) 'Enchanting...intriguing...All of these tales have a wonderfully surreal quality and a hip, witty tone.'

Read: Murakami name-drops Western music, not just classical but stuff like Miles Davis and The Doors. This makes him 'hip.' Or else, he writes sentences like 'A long, flimsy tin sign arching its sickly spine like an anal-sex enthusiast.' This is also very 'hip.' And he has story titles like 'The Fall of the Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds.' It's all very hip. Not. As for surrealism, I already explained why it doesn't apply here.

5) 'Murakami is a true original and yet in many ways he is also Franz Kafka's successor because he seems to have the intelligence to know what Kafka truly was - a comic writer.'

This would be ridiculous hyperbole under any standards, but Murakami is not particularly comic. If you think the above-stated anal-sex sentence, or the concept of a malevolent dancing dwarf ('The Dancing Dwarf') is funny enough to sustain stories without any real narrative heft, you might disagree. I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing it. Murakami doesn't do particularly well with humor: the attempts at it here are lame and juvenile. Nothing is especially surprising or cutting. There's no bite. You wonder whether sentences like 'Alone in this funhouse, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me.' are ridiculous on purpose or not, and whether it makes a difference.

Brent Peterson is an old school classicist who aspires to be a state-class mandarin of the Tang dynasty. He spends most of his time studying languages and texts that have been irrelevant to most people's lives for millenia while trying to finish his thesis.

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The Elephant Vanishes (象の消滅, Zō no shōmetsu) is a collection of 17 short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The stories were written between 1980 and 1991,^[1] and published in Japan in various magazines, then collections. The contents of this compilation were selected by Gary Fisketjon (Murakami's editor at Knopf) and first published in English translation in 1993 (its Japanese counterpart was released later in 2005). Several of the stories had already appeared (often with alternate translations) in the magazines The New Yorker, Playboy, and The Magazine (Mobil Corp.) before this compilation was published.

Stylistically and thematically, the collection aligns with Murakami's previous work. The stories mesh normality with surrealism, and focus on painful issues involving loss, destruction, confusion and loneliness. The title for the book is derived from the final story in the collection.

Contents[edit]

Synopsis[edit]

'The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women'[edit]

Note: This story was subsequently updated as the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

After being disturbed by a strange phone-call from an unknown woman demanding ten minutes of his time, a man goes in search of his wife's missing cat and meets a girl in a neighbor's garden.

'The Second Bakery Attack'[edit]

A recently married couple in their late twenties lie in bed, famished; they have little in their refrigerator: a six-pack of beer and some cookies. After drinking and eating all of it, the man recounts to his wife a time he and his friend “robbed” a bakery ten years ago. The two intended to take all the bread they could from a bakery by force. The man who ran the bakery offers a counterproposal before the two men can act: since he is a Richard Wagner fanatic, if they listen to Tannhäuser and The Flying Dutchman with him in the bakery, he will give them all the bread they can carry. They agree, and the bread is enough to feed the two men for a few days. After hearing of that story, the woman suggests that they do the same thing, despite it being 2:30 A.M.

They drive around Tokyo looking for a bakery but all of them are closed; they “compromise” to “rob” a McDonald's instead. With ski-masks and a Remington automatic shotgun, they enter the restaurant and demand thirty Big Macs. The three employees working there fulfill the peculiar request. The couple then leave the restaurant and drive until they find an empty parking lot; they then eat four to six Big Macs each until they are full. The man feels calm after this experience.

'The Kangaroo Communiqué'[edit]

A man working in the product-control section of a department store received a letter from a woman who wrote to complain that she had mistakenly bought Mahler instead of Brahms. The man is captivated by the woman's letter of complaint and so decides to make personal contact with her after seeing Kangaroos at a zoo; he decides to call this letter to her 'The Kangaroo Communiqué.'

'On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning'[edit]

A Tokyo man tells of passing the '100% perfect girl' for him in a Harajuku neighborhood. He imagines a scenario where an eighteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl meet and agree that they are 100% perfect for each other. To prove their hypothesis, they agree to go their separate ways and let fate bring them back together. Years go by and one winter, they both get terrible influenza which causes them to forget much of their respective young adult years. They run into each other in Harajuku when he is thirty-two and she is thirty, but they do not stop for each other. The man says that this is what he should have said to the '100% perfect girl.'

'Sleep'[edit]

A woman has not slept for 17 days but does not feel the need for sleep. She conceals her condition from her husband and children but spends the nights eating chocolate, drinking Rémy Martin brandy, reading Anna Karenina and going for drives through the city in her Civic. Ultimately, her insomnia takes her to a nearly deserted parking lot, where danger awaits.

'The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds'[edit]

A man writes his diary, prompted by unique phrases to remind him of the day's events.

'Lederhosen'[edit]

A woman tells of her mother's divorce, prompted by a trip to buy some lederhosen in Germany as a souvenir for her husband who has remained at home in Tokyo. The shop refuses to sell her any as her husband is not there to be fitted, so she finds a stranger of the same size.

'Barn Burning'[edit]

Note: This story was the basis for the 2018 South Korean psychological thriller film, Burning.

A 31-year-old married man and a 20-year-old woman begin a casual and unclear relationship. The woman, an amateur mime, decides to leave Japan for Algiers. Three months later, she returns with a Japanese boyfriend. One day, the woman and her boyfriend ask if they can visit the man's home; because his wife is away visiting relatives, he agrees to the gathering. The three drink carelessly and smoke grass in the man's living room; the woman needs to be helped to bed after smoking one joint.

Back in the living room, the boyfriend tells him about his idiosyncratic need to burn a barn about every two months. Interested, the man asks why and how he does this. The boyfriend replies that he feels morally obligated to do so and that he picks the barns that he will burn based on their condition. After the woman wakes up, she and the boyfriend leave the man's place, leaving the man very curious about barn burning. He plans his next few days around scouting possible barns nearby that the boyfriend might burn. He narrows it down to five barns, and passes by all of them on his morning run for a month, but there are no signs of arson.

The man sees the boyfriend again during Christmas and they share coffee. He asks if the boyfriend has burned a barn recently; he says he did a month ago. Before leaving, the boyfriend asks if the man has seen the woman lately; he says no, and the boyfriend says that he has not either, and she does not answer her phone or door. The man checks her apartment and sees that her mailbox filled with fliers. When he checks again later, he sees a new name on the door and realizes that she has disappeared. Continuing his daily routine, he sometimes thinks about barns burning.

'The Little Green Monster'[edit]

A monster burrows up into a woman's garden, breaks into her house, and proposes love. The creature can read her mind and she uses this fact to fight against it. Because of her adamant rejection of the monster, it eventually dies, reduced to nothing more than a shadow.

'Family Affair'[edit]

A bachelor and his younger sister live together in a Tokyo apartment. During a trip to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, the sister meets a man named Noboru Watanabe who later becomes her fiancé; the man disapproves of her choice. The sister retorts by saying that she thinks her brother tries to make a joke out of everything.

When the sister invites Noboru over for dinner at the apartment, the men get a chance to interact with each other talking about plans after the wedding. The bachelor then leaves to go out for a drink. He meets a woman at a bar; they talk about baseball and proceed to have sex at her apartment after a few more drinks. When he returns home, he and his sister have a talk about their sex lives, where they learn the number of partners they each slept with; the bachelor says twenty-six while the sister says two before she met Noboru. After, they proceed to their separate rooms for the night.

'A Window'[edit]

A graduate spends a year working at 'The Pen Society' where he is employed to reply to letters from members, grading and making constructive comments on their prose. When he leaves he makes personal contact with one of his correspondents, a childless, married woman. They spend an evening at her place eating dinner and discussing their interests, particularly regarding arts and letters, before he leaves. When he passes by her neighborhood ten years later, he thinks fondly of that afternoon he spent with her.

'TV People'[edit]

20–30% smaller than normal people, the TV people install a television in the narrator's flat, but the change is ignored by his wife. He later spots them carrying a television through his workplace, but when he mentions it to his colleagues they change the subject. Then his wife disappears.

'A Slow Boat to China'[edit]

A Tokyo man recounts his contacts with Chinese people.

In 1959 or 1960 when the man was still in secondary school, he goes to a 'Chinese elementary school' to take a standardize aptitude test. He remembers having to traverse up a hill to the classroom. When the proctor arrives he gives clear test-taking directions before announcing that he is Chinese and teaches at the school. He then asks the forty test-takers to respect the desks by not vandalizing them. Everyone but the narrator responds 'yes' and the proctor tells them to be proud.

As a nineteen-year-old college student in Tokyo, he meets a similar-aged Chinese woman during a part-time job at a publisher's warehouse; being born in Japan, she has little ties to her ethnic background. After their final day on the job, they agree to have dinner together and go to the discotheque. After their night of leisure, he mistakenly directs her onto the wrong train. Noticing his mistake, he takes the next train to the last station to reunite with her. After admitting his mistake and the woman confessing her insecurities, he says that he will call her tomorrow before she takes the next train back home. The following morning, he realizes that he threw away the matchbook on which her phone number was written. Despite that gaffe, he tries multiple alternatives to obtaining her number but is unsuccessfully; he never sees her again.

As a 28-year-old businessman, the man runs into a Chinese classmate from high school in Aoyama. Although they talk for a while in a coffee shop, the man is unable to recall who his colleague is until the line 'a lot of water has gone under the bridge' is uttered, a memorable line from their English textbook from high school. The colleague then tells him about how he sells encyclopedias to Chinese families in Tokyo. Wanting for information about the infobooks, he gives his business card to the colleague before they go their separate ways.

The story ends with the narrator reminiscing on his idiosyncratic relationship with Chinese people.

'The Dancing Dwarf'[edit]

A man working at a factory manufacturing elephants dreams of a dancing dwarf, then hears the dwarf existed and danced for the king prior to the revolution. In a subsequent dream he makes a pact with the dwarf to win the heart of a beautiful girl at the factory dance.

'The Last Lawn of the Afternoon'[edit]

Proud of his work, a man decides to give up his job mowing lawns as having split up from his girlfriend he no longer needs the money. He tells of his last assignment near Yomiuri Land.(1987)

'The Silence'[edit]

While waiting for a flight to Niigata, an unnamed narrator asks his friend Ozawa, an amateur boxer, if the pugilist has ever punched another person over an argument; Ozawa responds by saying that he did once, during a middle school feud with classmate Aoki.

Aoki was a model student who always got the top scores on tests. However, during one English test in middle school, Ozawa bested Aoki's score; Ozawa confesses that his parents promising him to buy an exclusive item motivated him to study harder than ever before. When Aoki learns of his 'failure,' he spreads the rumor that Ozawa cheated on the test. When Ozawa confronted Aoki about the incident, Aoki showed much contempt and Ozawa retaliated by punching him in the jaw; the two do not talk for years even when they are in high school.

During the final year of high school, Matsumoto, a classmate of both boys, committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. When the police investigated the tragedy, they learned that he was bullied by classmates, but are not sure of who gave him the bruises. They suspected Ozawa because of his boxing background and because he had hit another student in the past; Ozawa concluded that Aoki spread that rumor about him, still feeling sore about their run-in during middle school. Ozawa, despite being cleared of any wrongdoing, was still ignored by his classmates; they maintained a complete silence towards him for the rest of high school. Once, he stared down Aoki while enduring the silence until the end of the school year.

Ozawa tells the narrator that he has an idiosyncratic admiration for people like Aoki who cunningly seize opportunity. Ozawa then expresses disappointment in humanity that so many are willing to believe lies and follow without question people like Aoki. The two men decides to get a beer as they continue to wait for their flight.

'The Elephant Vanishes'[edit]

An elderly elephant and its keeper disappear without a trace, the narrator being the last to see them.

Additional publication[edit]

The Dancing Dwarf Murakami Pdf Art

While the list above details which stories appeared before the publication of The Elephant Vanishes, many of the stories have also appeared elsewhere more recently:

• 'On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning' was read on the Public Radio International show This American Life.
• 'The Little Green Monster' was read on the Public Radio International show Selected Shorts.

Theatrical adaptation[edit]

The British theatre company Complicite collaborated with Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre to produce a stage adaptation also entitled The Elephant Vanishes.^[2] The production featured three of the stories in Murakami's collection ('Sleep,' 'The Second Bakery Attack,' and the title story). Directed by Simon McBurney and starring a Japanese cast, the play opened in May, 2003, in Tokyo before touring internationally in limited festival runs. The performance was in Japanese with English supertitles.

The show incorporated a great deal of multimedia, which Complicite had traditionally eschewed, but married it with the company's trademark communal storytelling and demanding physical performance style. The eponymous elephant, for example, was represented at one time by a magnified eye on a video screen, and at another time by four live actors bent over office chairs. This combination of technical wizardry and compelling human narrative received high praise from critics, who also cited the play's humor, realism, and dreamlike motion, a fitting tribute to Murakami's prose.^[3][4][5]

Popular culture[edit]

• The short story 'The Elephant Vanishes' inspired a research paper^[6] on Asian elephants and their impact on the well-being of the rural poor in India.
• 'The Second Bakery Attack' was used as a scene in The Polar Bear, a German movie starring Til Schweiger, written and co-directed by Granz Henman.
• 'The Second Bakery Attack' also became a basis for an episode of the South Korean film trilogy Acoustic.
• 'Barn Burning' was adapted into the 2018 film Burning by South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong, which premiered to great acclaim at the Cannes film festival of that same year.

References[edit]

1. ^Full title 象の消滅 : 短篇選集, 1980–1991 (Zō no shōmetsu : tanpen senshū, 1980–1991). See also publication history at Haruki Murakami#Short stories.
2. ^Complicite.org
3. ^The Guardian
4. ^Ft.com
5. ^The New York Times
6. ^Oxford.academia.edu Jadhav, S., and M. Barua. 2012. The Elephant Vanishes: Impact of human-elephant Conflict on people's well-being. Health & Place.

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