Seeking Out The Elephant:

Spotlight on Haruki Murakami’s Short Stories


Adam Entsminger
Adrienne Hurley
Japanese Short Fiction


“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.” Haruki Murakami is weird, I feel, or perhaps I should be fair and say that his writing is what is strange. Perhaps the man himself is actually very straight and normal; I would even go further and say that he is methodical. It is this meshing of his method and technique with the complete absurdity of his writing that makes his stories so immensely intriguing. What Murakami does is to take a simple piece of content, perhaps simple is a poor word choice, but an idea that can be at least loosely grasped and thought upon, and take it into a context so bizarre that it creates this absolutely surreal feeling. And this feeling just makes you as the reader just go with it; suspend your disbelief and just accept what he is telling you. And this strategy is beautifully successful. The reader completely escapes into these worlds and upon returning to real life, brings back gems of understanding and interpretation, not to mention a great deal of entertainment. These treasures shine brightly would put up against some of Japan’s other short fiction, literature that shines in a different, almost dimmer if not necessarily duller light.

Murakami was born in 1949 Kyoto to a Buddhist Priest father and a mother who both taught Japanese literature. He grew up in Kobe and eventually studied drama at Waseda University. It was here in Tokyo where he met his wife Yoko and worked in a record store and ran a jazz bar named the “Peter Cat.” Murakami’s dive into writing did not occur until his thirties, where the story goes that he was suddenly hit by a compulsion to write a novel at a baseball game. Later he taught at Princeton and Tufts Universities. Murakami has suffered from some criticism that he writes mere pop literature, a term that has a stigma of the low brow and unliterary, yet he has won numerous awards and turned the opinions of former naysayers. Murakami’s work often smells of a great Western influence as well as a sense of music, many of his titles are direct references to song. Perhaps this is a reason he is often written off the literary radar, and also why he stands apart from other Japanese short fiction. He has a style all his own, but nonetheless a style that combines the east and west, much like the world of Japan itself does. He understands and uses this.

Although frequently a novelist, Murakami has written a fair share of short stories. One collection is entitled The Elephant Vanishes. From this, I will focus on a set of three stories. These were not chosen arbitrarily, but in fact lifted from an arranged set that is used in another medium. Complicite, a British theater group performs a production, The Elephant Vanishes, which is actually an adaptation for the stage of these three stories. I used this group’s selection in order to not choose stories I prefer or dislike from the collection. The short stories are The Second Bakery Attack, Sleep, and the final yet title story, The Elephant Vanishes. The Second Bakery Attack was first published in Playboy and the other two first appeared in The New Yorker. It is important to note that Jay Rubin has translated all these cross sections of the collection, so consistency has been preserved. This commentary will of course reflect on him as well.

The Second Bakery Attack is a story about a young married couple that suddenly awake in the middle of the night sharing extreme pangs of hunger. They have no substantial food in the house and are far too hungry to return to bed. They sit in the kitchen and attempt to chat but it is awkward, and eventually leads the husband to speak of his first bakery attack. He was young and poor and hadn’t eaten in a while. He and his best friend decided to rob a attack a bakery for its bread, not rob it for its money. The wife does not quite understand the story but it is she who suggests that they now must rob another bakery for it is the only way to purge their hunger. They set out to do it but are unable to find an all night bakery and settle upon a McDonald’s, which they attack and steal thirty Big Macs from, and pay for two cokes. They leave, eat, and the wife rests on his shoulder, their hunger gone.

Before anything else, I will quickly note the obvious intrusion of the West. The only place the couple can find to attack is a McDonald’s. When they are inside and order the manager to close the shutters and turn off the sign, the man can’t help but declare he can’t do that. “Wait a minute, I can’t do that. I’ll be held responsible if I close up without permission.” Whether this is a commentary on the extreme work ethic of the Japanese or money grabbing of capitalism, I am not sure; it could be both. When the couple is first struck with the hunger, it is described as, “the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.” This one of many ways Murakami simply evokes thoughts of the West. Also, it is interesting to think about that tornado. In that film, the tornado has enough force to rip Dorothy from one reality into another. I can clearly see this as a similarity with Murakami, he is that tornado and he can just as easily take his characters as well as his readers into another surreal place, and then drop them back in the normal plain with just as much ease. As far as Murakami’s obsession with music goes, he plays that right into the story as well. The husband’s first attack was spoiled, actually it was really just altered, by the baker who proposed that if the man and his friend were to simply listen to his entire album of Wagner Overtures, he would let them take as much bread as they wanted. There is more here than just music, but I will touch on that later.

Before I look at these three stories as a single unit, I want to look at them individually. I saw this piece as being mostly about marriage. “I’ve never been this hungry in my whole life, I wonder if it has anything to do with being married.” The couple experiences their incredible hunger after they have been married only two weeks. This hunger is just a device to represent the hollow feeling they each have from their marriage not fulfilling what they thought it would. Perhaps they rushed into it, or they just don’t know each other as well as they thought. Regardless, the assumption that this institution of marriage would fill in the gaps between them was false. “I met you and got married. I never did anything like that again. No more bakery attacks.” The man was a different person before the marriage; whether it was because oh himself, her, or the marriage itself doesn’t matter, he is not the same person anymore, and how can changing yourself like that breed a happy and successful marriage? “I didn’t want to talk about them with her.” The answer is it can’t, and will only lead to hiding the emergence of the part of you that is bound away.

The wife sees this problem, and perhaps more than the husband wishes to solve it. “And unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, it’ll stick with you like a toothache. It’ll torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too.” She knows that because of this marriage, whether it was good idea or bad (“wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa”), they are in this together and either they both find a way to fulfill that hunger, that empty hole within themselves, or they will rot away. So they do this second bakery attack together, and somehow, it pulls them together. “Sometimes you just have to compromise.” They are compromising themselves, each putting himself at risk to be discovered by the other in this act, and this compromise and vulnerability is what strengthens them as a single unit. When they confront the employees they are now a “masked duo,” evidence of their new solidarity. When the husband has the shotgun pointed at the workers, he has an urge to rip into one of the burgers, “but I could not be certain that such an act would be consistent with our objective.” Of course not, their objective has nothing to do with actual stomach based hunger. This whole time a young couple has been asleep at one of the tables and the husband wonders, “What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep.” He should know the answer; emptiness like the one he has just faced could rouse them. The real question should have been what allows them to sleep so peacefully. And the answer is love and unity. “Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder.” Now that they have used this act to learn about each other, become part of each other’s history, and consolidate themselves, that hunger is gone, and they can rest like that couple inside the McDonald’s.

Sleep is the story of a wife and mother who one day finds herself unable to sleep. So she goes through her normal daily routines and at night reads and reads and drinks brandy. A very short description for a story much longer than the previous one, however, as far as the plot goes, not much happens. This story is all about her perception of life and how she feels. This is another story about marriage. “No one could guarantee that we would survive in such a tough world. But we have survived, one way or another. Five years. No, we really can’t complain.” The problem is that surviving in itself is not enough to live on. The wife is surviving in that home, yes, but she is not really living. “It’s a recognition of reality- of the fact that e have managed in one way or another to survive- and it’s an important ritual for us.” This surviving is all they have. She is trapped in a marriage, in a way of life that is killing her. “Had I remained immersed in the dream for another second, I would have been lost forever.” That dream was her life as it was, monotonous and unfulfilling, and if she kept sleeping through it there would be no hope left for her. But she has woken up, she no longer sleeps and it is in these night time hours that are hers alone that she reads and escapes this life of hers into a different life all together, and it is there where she is truly living. This story is full of metaphors and lines that reflect this stale sense of being lost in the static world of the housewife. She too feels a “tremendous hunger” as the other married couple had felt, but she fills it only temporarily here and there with books. At the end, she returns to a dark pier in the middle of the night where she had previously been warned about rape and murder occurring recently, but anything, even acts so terrible as those, would be a welcome occurrence into her life. At least those would prove she is alive. “I’ll never get the key. I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to turn it over.” This is how the story concludes. This is a concise description of her life. She is confined to the kitchen by her husband and son, and this life is about to drive her insane.

The Elephant Vanishes is a simple and short story. A zoo runs out of money and a town acquires its old elephant and old keeper because no other zoos which to purchase them. There are two groups, one who would like to keep the elephant, and the other who would rather do without it. The town keeps it, and sets it up with an enclosure and all it needs. After a year the elephant and its keeper simply vanish, without a trace and without possible explanation of escape. The narrator sells kitchen appliances, and meets a magazine worker whom he hopes to advertise with. They get to talking personally and eventually the story of the elephant comes up. It turns out he was the last to see the elephant and keeper from an opening on an overlooking hill he relaxes at. He describes the two as somehow changing, as if the elephant were shrinking, but before he could really observe closely the lights went out and the next day they were gone.

On first glimpse I thought this story was about the elderly and even nursing homes. “And so, after its companions were gone, the elephant stayed alone in the decaying zoo for nearly four months with nothing to do- not that it had had anything to do before.” All the descriptions and in this story just sent out this elderly vibe. Even the keeper himself, “The elephant’s keeper was a small, bony old man… his almost perfectly circular ears stuck out on either side with disturbing prominence.” The similar descriptions of keeper and animal make be see them as similar, old creatures. “He seemed to like the children who visited the elephant house, and he worked at being nice to them, but the children never really warmed to him.” This line was absolutely ringing with tones of an old folk’s home. The grandchildren being force to go and see their grandparents who liked to seem them, but the kids just being grossed out and not wanting to be there. “The disappearance of one old elephant and one old elephant keeper would have no impact on the course of society.” The key word here seems to be old. It seems to say that if old people were just to disappear, the rest of the world, the youth and adults simply wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even notice. It is interesting to note in regards to Murakami’s obsession with the West, that the narrator’s company insists on using the English word for “kit-chin” as opposed to the Japanese. “I had the feeling that to some extent the difference between them had shrunk.” It is as if the elephant and his keeper had compromised, the beast becoming smaller and the man growing, so that in the end they were the same thing; we wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. They aren’t individuals, just the old.

So that’s what each story was about, but after reading them all there is a connection. A little research revealed the term hikikomori that can mean “acute social withdrawal.” This, it seems, is what this collection of short stories is all about. The husband and wife feeling withdrawn from each other in The Second Bakery Attack, the wife feeling completely isolated her role as housewife in Sleep, and the narrator’s strange sense of not being able to discuss the elephant in The Elephant Vanishes. The entire collection is riddled with lines that vouch this sense of reclusion. “I didn’t want to talk about them with her,” “so I didn’t see a doctor and I didn’t say anything to my parents or friends, because I knew that was exactly what they would tell me to do,” “I just know…this is something I have to deal with myself,” “I didn’t want to get involved with anybody. I didn’t wan to have to waste time on endless gossiping,” etc. The bakery story ended well because the couple ended their withdrawal, and the sleep story ended poorly because the wife did not. “The most important thing is unity,” says the narrator in the title story. “And 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.” Joining together with someone in unity is very important and something that Murakami must feel deeply about. The title story reflects this most and in different facets, both positive, the elephant and keeper, and negative, the narrator unable to successfully share the elephant story with another.

The other Japanese short fiction I have read seemed to be more about style and tone than anything else. They were all overtly complex and confusing, often super autobiographical, and dealing with the identity crises of the authors. They were often dark and as often as not unentertaining. But Murakami takes some of these characteristics and injects them with life, content, understanding, and possibly most important, entertainment.