Books of the Month

'The Elephant Vanishes' by Haruki Murakami

NOVEMBER 2005

I've chosen a collection of short stories as my Book of the Month this month. You may be familiar with Japanese author Haruki Murakami as the author of weird and wonderful novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or cult love story Norwegian Wood, but he's also an accomplished short story writer too.

The Elephant Vanishes contains stories written in the 1980s (and translated later), and the range of material is a good introduction to Murakami if you haven't come across him before. 'The Little Green Monster' and 'The Dancing Dwarf' are examples of his more surreal adventures. In the former, a housewife is horrified when a scaly creature enters her home, reads her mind, and declares that it loves her. She promptly gets rid of it by thinking nasty thoughts about what she'd do to it if she could. And in an excursion into fairy tale, the 'dancing dwarf' appears in the dream of a man who works in an elephant factory (yes an elephant factory - where they make elephants of course), and enters the dreamer's waking body to help him win over a woman.

There are also stories told in Murakami's trademark deadpan style, stories of everyday life in modern Japan, featuring twenty- and thirty-somethings who frequently have too much time on their hands. 'The Second Bakery Attack' tells of a young man and his girlfriend who lift a curse they feel has been put upon them - manifested in a ravenous hunger which abruptly racks them both one night - by holding up a McDonalds and making off with thirty Big Macs.

My favourites, however, are those stories which balance a sense of the surreal, or at least the unknowable, with the matter-of-fact and the quotidian. In the title story, for instance, there seems to be no answer to the mystery of how a local elephant has disappeared from its cage. But the significance Murakami seems to want us to acknowledge is that elephants can just disappear - and that there are plenty of things we'll never understand, but would do well to accept. In 'Barn Burning' too, the narrator is intrigued by a man who claims to go around the country burning down isolated barns for fun. He broods on this so much that he almost tries his hand at it himself. In the end we're unsure if the man was ever telling the truth, or whether 'barn burning' isn't some kind of metaphor for something, well, unknowable.

If you like nice neat endings, Murakami will probably leave you frustrated. His conclusions rarely tie up all the loose ends - in fact, his stories are all about loose ends which by their very nature can never come together. But his writing is extremely enjoyable for all that, and if you haven't tried it before, one of his short story collections could be an ideal place to start.

Susan Tranter

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