The Elephant Vanishes: Stories Paperback – June 28, 1994

One of my favourite Japanese writers. There is no one else who can write about loneliness the way he does. Murakami's collection of stories is simply superb! I was struggling to find a good blip from this book, one that will give a proper sense of Murakami's style and material. It's a problem, because when I pick something out of context, it sounds plain and ordinary. If I pick something from his dream-like sequences it sounds kitschy. This would be messing with the impact of his stories, which aren't even close to being simple or over-cute... Profound is a better description fo Murakami's work, and mystic in an urban, understated kind of way. The Washington Post Book Review says (on the book cover) that Murakami "takes big risks." and one can see why they might say that. My strong impression is that fully half of his stories are drawn from his dreams, and you know how wonky dreams can get. His work often takes a sudden shift, or it stops, without full resolution. But it's okay, dangling bits can add to the richness of a good story. The story titles are quite illustrative:-The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women -Sleep -The Fall of The Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and The Realm of Raging Winds -The Little Green Monster -TV People -The Dancing DwarfAside from these dream-like stories he's got more matter-of-fact ones (see more titles below). One of Marukami's strengths is that he can write a story almost as one tells one in conversation, starting with the bit that made you think of it in the first place, mentioning 'real life' asides and in the process including the reader in a subtle and complex experience.

The quote from Henry David Thoreau goes something like, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I thought of that quote a lot when reading this book. This book is a series of short stories. It seemed to me, the recurring theme in these stories is this: The main character gets a glimpse of something extraordinary (sometimes potentially supernatural, sometimes not, but always extraordinary). But, then the pull of the mundane life takes over and they are drawn back into it. The book is full of missed opportunities to experience the extraordinary.As with all of Murakami's books, this one is well written, especially the character development. In some of these short stories, there are hints of his longer works. Such as, one is practically a prologue to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This book is worth reading, for sure. The only reason I didn't give it a 5, is that these short stories left me feeling like there should be more. I like his novels better, when he actually gives us more.

These stories are each gems~Kafka would have loved them and so did I. I love the people, the details — what they eat, what they drink, how they love. Murakami’s work is fascinating.

I have read this book countless of times ever since I laid my eyes on this back in early 2010's.I especially love to read this when I go on a long solo vacation.What an incredible book as a travel companion! I can't never get tired of Murakami's wild imagination and words in this short story collection.

If you've read more than one of Murakami's novels, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect: an offbeat, loner protagonist, who speaks matter-of-factly, and confronts the anomie of contemporary Japanese life via listening to jazz records and a series of awkward, near-miss relationships. I bought this collection to find out "Was he a similar writer early on? And is he as good in the short story genre as he is in novels?"The answers were yes, he was very similar, and no, the short stories were not as satisfying as his novels. The narrators were comparable--making it hard to infer that they are not generally based on the author himself. For all his other strengths, a variety of narrative voices does not seem to be one of them. And after reading these stories, I concluded that the slow simmer of his writing comes to a more productive boil in the longer genre. So all in all, still enjoyable reading, but I would definitely recommend that someone pick up Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun, or the Wind-up Bird Chronicle instead for a first encounter with Murakami.

Murakami's short stories deal with big themes so precisely and delicately that they barely intrude for the enjoyable first reading and then they flood in on me for the more enjoyable second reading. The third story of the collection is The Kangaroo Communique. It is a second person narrative between a male department store employee who is responding to a letter of complaint from a female customer. This story is followed by another, called On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, which is a narrative, within a narrative, within a story. They both are love stories Murakami-style, reality and subjective experience communicated simultaneously. My personal favorite of the collection is called The Silence. In it a man recounts his experience of being shunned in high school on the basis of a slanderous lie. He remains undefeated by his tormentors due to the mental lessons he received from the martial art of boxing. Murakami's fiction is informative in so many ways; full of psychological, historical, and cultural facts. Amazingly, this short-fiction may be fuller than his five-hundred plus page novels.

This is the first Murakami book I've read and I would give him five stars if it wasn't for the fact that I found his writing somehow depressing. This depressing touch that he has doesn't make him a bad writer, on the contrary, he's incredible and utterly profound, and his stories are deeply thought provoking. I actually started reading a novel of his, so despite the fact that you won't find a regular 'happy-ending' in his stories, you definitely would go for more.I actually would like to read the book again. His stories are full of symbolism.