Murakami brilliantly captures the complexities of human happiness and suffrage in his story “The Elephant Vanishes.” The way in which the narrator reveals his obsession with the elephant and its caretaker is nuanced and eloquently told. As the narrator tries to make sense of the vanishing elephant and caretaker, and their relationship to each other, he discovers a part of himself that is also exceedingly complicated and mysterious.
In “The Elephant Vanishes,” the narrator is reading the newspaper when a large headline catches his eye: “ELEPHANT MISSING IN TOKYO SUBURBS.” According to the article, the elephant and his keeper’s absence was first noticed at two o’clock in the afternoon of May 18; prior to that, nothing unusual about their behavior had been detected. The Elephant Vanishes. WHEN THE ELEPHANT disappeared from our town’s elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper. My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at 6:13. I went to the kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read. “The Elephant Vanishes” is the story of an elderly zoo elephant who mysteriously vanishes after being taken in by a suburban Japanese community when the town’s zoo closes, as well as this event’s lasting effects on the story’s narrator. The narrative shifts back in forth in time between the present (post-disappearance) and the past. Complete summary of Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes. ENotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of The Elephant Vanishes.
That’s probably because people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function. (460)
The narrator reveals his obsession with the town’s elephant immediately in the story. He describes in depth how his world revolves around the elephant and states how “The elephant could become the town’s symbol.” (455) When the elephant disappears, the narrator feels as though the town has unfavorably changed, “Without the elephant, something about the place seemed wrong. It looked bigger than it needed to be, blank and empty…” (453) The narrator seems to fill his time reading about the missing elephant in order to fill his own “blank and empty” void. (453) He is a salesman who doesn’t find purpose or reward in his work. “And in this pragmatic world of ours, things you can’t sell don’t count for much.” (460) He is depressed due to the lack of diversity, passion, and adventure in his life, so he becomes intrigued to the point of obsession, and travels everyday to see the elephant. He is so fixated on the thought of the vanishing elephant, that he decides to bring up the subject while talking with a woman whom he has a romantic interest with. “I knew that I had brought up one of the least suitable topics I could have found for this occasion. No, I should never have mentioned the elephant.” (461)
The disappearance of the elephant along with its caretaker suggest that the two are linked spiritually, “you could sense their closeness in every gesture and look… Or possibly it had some special power resembling mental telepathy and could read the keeper’s mind.” (456) The narrator describes the caretaker and the elephant’s physical features very similarly: old, wrinkled, hair “stiff and short” (456), and the uncanny resemblance of their big ears. The narrator goes on to exclaim that the last time he visits the elephant house, he “had the feeling that to some extent the difference between them had shrunk.” (464) This metaphor parallels with the narrator’s idea of unity. The caretaker and the elephant are both very old, and it seems as though this distance closing between them represents their lives coming to an end, as they pass from this life to the next, together and as one.
The Elephant Vanishes Pdf
The description in this story is beautiful! The way in which the narrator describes the atmosphere of the town as a place of “doom and desolation that hung there like a huge, oppressive raincloud” (459) seems to serve as a visual representation for the depression he feels about the part of himself that is lost when the elephant disappears.
Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair…It’s probably something in me. (465)
The abrupt disappearance of the elephant and its caretaker unsettles the narrator, and causes him to escalate further into his depression, and possibly sparks the beginnings of insanity. “I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me.” (465) He slips into a deep sadness, “washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean.” (459)
I’m left wondering, is it his own insanity that has causes him to imagine the entire situation involving the elephant and the caretaker? Is he aware of his mental instability, thus causing him to feel “incapable of distinguishing between the probable results of doing [something] and not doing [something]?”(465)
Keywords: the elephant vanishes symbolism, the elephant vanishes analysis, the elephant vanishes themes
One of the major themes in this story is the idea of things being out of balance. This theme is established when the narrator tells the editor about the importance of unison in kitchen design, as he explains that, “Even the most beautifully designed item dies if it is out of balance with its surroundings.” The narrator goes on to put emphasis on balance between the environment and the creature that calls it home when he talks about witnessing the change in size of the elephant compared to its keeper. He explains that their size became equal, whether it was the keeper who grew or the elephant that shrank, or perhaps a bit of both. The narrator once again puts across the idea that “things around me have lost their proper balance” after the disappearance of the two. He is no longer able to take action on his own behalf, as he is haunted by a sense that the urban world is out of balance, and he feels that a kind of natural balance has broken down inside him.
Linked to the theme of imbalance is the comparison between reality and appearances. The reporter that is covering the strange occurrence tries very hard to maintain the false impression that the elephant simply escaped, when the facts surrounding the whole thing points to none other than a supernatural vanishing. The narrator points out that this is indeed strange and continues to observe that all of the townspeople try to hide behind a similar guise of normality. This inconsistency between appearances and reality comes up again in the narrator’s job. He goes about his day as usual and maintains a no-nonsense professional approach even though he himself does not agree that a kitchen must have unity, or any of the other principles his company cites in order to sell the products. The narrator discovers that he cannot decide on the differences between reality and appearance, and while he questions his own perception, he suffers, once again, a sense of disorientation and confusion.
Another concern of the story is how modern development has displaced the older, more traditional ways of life. The setting is a prosperous Tokyo suburb in the 1980’s, when an economic boom was occurring in Japan. The construction of high-rise condominiums sets the events of the story in motion. These condos replace the old zoo, forcing the elephant to be relocating to a new elephant house. Thus, the keeper and his elephant become a symbol of former ways of life and sensitive relationships, which are being pushed aside by accommodation endeavors. Murakami lightly mocks the absurdity of modern life throughout the story, particularly when the narrator describes the town’s reaction to the elephant’s disappearance. The reactions of various townspeople such as the mayor, a “worried-looking” mother, the police, Self-Defense Force troops, an anchor, and the reporter show how useless and illogical conventional urban responses can be. As the narrator puts it, the newspaper articles were all “either pointless or off the mark.” Police response is ridiculous and futile. In all, the absurd public response to the bizarre situation of a misplaced elephant shows, in almost a comic way, how urban mindset fails to imagine, much less comprehend, the implausible or intuitive.
The Elephant Vanishes Sleep
Throughout this story, the author reveals subtly that the removal of the old ways of life leaves the people feeling mixed-up. Murakami also puts emphasis on how the new ways create detachment and discomfort. For example, the narrator goes about his job as a public relations executive by abiding to the motto that “things you can’t sell don’t count for much.” In reality, he really does not believe this statement, he says it and uses it and it seems to confuse him, making him question his purpose in life. Just like some of the author’s other characters, the narrator is single, a loner, and lives by himself with no obvious connections with friends or family. Due to this, he marvels at the connection between the elephant and its keeper, their closeness to one another. Subsequent to the elephant’s disappearance, the narrator feels low, more isolated, and alone than ever.
The Elephant Vanishes Summary
Murakami uses the motif of water to reinforce readers’ awareness of disappearance or a sense of dissolution. The narrator, when discussing how the interest factor in the elephant’s disappearance faded after a few months had passed, states, “Amid the endless surge and ebb of everyday life, interest in a missing elephant could not last forever,” thus likening daily life to the eroding action of ocean tides. The water motif occurs again several paragraphs later, when the narrator compares summer memories to water flowing “into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean.” Here too the water motif conveys a sense of things disappearing inevitably into a vast ocean. Since water can evaporate into air and is inherently unstable, this motif mirrors the vanishing, parallels the idea of impermanence, and suggests the narrator’s sense of being unsettled by a world out of balance.
Murakami instills the image of rain into the reader in order to express a sense of gloom and/or sadness. The narrator exemplifies this as he describes the now empty elephant house, “A few short months without its elephant had given the place an air of doom and desolation that hung there like a huge, oppressive rain cloud.” Afterward, when he is talking to the editor, he mentions the presence of a quiet, dam rain, once again putting forth the existence of an unrelenting, corroding, and perturbing force. Their conversation starts to take a strange course at the mention of the elephant and afterwards the narrator makes a comparison with the melting ice in the editor’s drink to a “tiny ocean current.” With this image, it is possible that Murakami again creates an ambience of things dissolving in some sinister, enveloping force.
The Elephant Vanishes Analysis
In my opinion, Murakami did an amazing job embedding themes throughout his short story The Elephant Vanishes. He used his abstract writing to convey important societal messages like imbalance, perception, and the views of modern living. Murakami also made the story more personal by incorporating a first person stance. This single view enhanced the confusion. By using dialogue, his motifs, and his similes, Haruki Murakami kept the story enjoyable and readable, although it is sometimes hard to follow along. At the end of the story, it is difficult not to ask questions about the society portrayed in the book. I believe this is what the author was aiming for and I believe he succeeded. By asking questions about the story, the reader, in actuality, is asking questions about their own world.