Haruki Murakami Resources - the elephant vanishes

exorcising ghosts
haruki murakami resources in english

the elephant vanishes (象の消滅, Zō no shōmetsu)

Annthology of 17 short stories, complied by Gary Fisketjon

Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin

UK Edition:
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage (8 Feb 2001)
ISBN-10: 0099448750

US Edition:
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 28, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0679750533

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Contents:

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 BuildingThe 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

excerpt available from the Random House site (from "The Wind-up Bird And Tuesday's Women")

synopsis

A seamless melding of Japanese cultural nuances with universal themes--in a virtuoso story collection from rising literary star Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1991). These 15 pieces, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy, are narrated by different characters who nonetheless share similar sensibilities and attitudes. At home within their own urban culture, they happily pick and choose from Western cultural artifacts as varied as Mozart tapes, spaghetti dinners, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts in a terrain not so much surreal as subtly out of kilter, and haunted by the big questions of death, courage, and love. In the title story, the narrator--who does p.r. for a kitchen-appliance maker and who feels that ``things around [him] have lost their balance,'' that a ``pragmatic approach'' helps avoid complicated problems--is troubled by the inexplicable disappearance of a local elephant and his keeper.

In another notable story, ``Sleep,'' a young mother, unable to sleep, begins to question not only her marriage and her affection for her child, but death itself, which may mean ``being eternally awake and staring into darkness.'' Stories like ``TV People,'' in which a man's apartment is taken over by TV characters who ``look as if they were reduced by photocopy, everything mechanically calibrated''; ``Barn Burning,'' in which a man confesses to burning barns (it helps him keep his sense of moral balance); and ``The Second Bakery Attack,'' in which a young married couple rob a McDonald's of 30 Big Macs in order to exorcise the sense of a ``weird presence'' in their lives--all exemplify Murakami's sense of the fragility of the ordinary world. Remarkable evocations of a postmodernist world, superficially indifferent but transformed by Murakami's talent into a place suffused with a yearning for meaning.