The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author known for his unique blend of surrealism, magical realism, and internality. He was born on January 12, 1949 in Kyoto, Japan. His parents both taught Japanese literature, and Murakami was interested in literature himself from a young age, eventually studying drama at university. But Murakami did not actually begin writing until the late 1970s. In the years after he graduated from college, Murakami managed a jazz club in a suburb of Tokyo together with his wife, Yoko Takahashi.

In 1979, Murakami published his first literary work, the novel Hear the Wind Sing. This debut work, characterized by its minimalist prose and contemplative tone, set the stage for what would become Murakami’s hallmark storytelling style. The novel offered glimpses into the minds of its characters, often young individuals grappling with isolation, nostalgia, and the complexities of modern life, all themes that continue to resurface throughout Murakami’s oeuvre. The novel was highly acclaimed and won the Gunzo Award. Murakami followed the success of his first novel with two more novels, Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which brought Murakami international attention, and A Wild Sheep Chase was his first novel translated into English. Another novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), won Murakami the prestigious Junichiro Tanizaki Prize.

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Murakami lived and traveled abroad, holding positions at Princeton University, Harvard University, and Tufts University. It is to this period that Murakami’s first short story collection, The Elephant Vanishes, belongs (published in Japanese in 1991, translated into English in 1993). In fact, many of the stories collected in The Elephant Vanishes were written as early as the early or mid-1980s, and many had already been published in English. Murakami’s short stories, like his early novels, navigate the line between the absurd and the profound, reflecting on moments of human vulnerability and the inexplicable in the midst of ordinary life. Murakami has published further short stories in past decades, including the stories collected in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006), and, most recently, First Person Singular (2020).

Western influences play an important role in Murakami’s early oeuvre. Murakami has cited Western authors such as Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, and Kurt Vonnegut as influential on his work, and his indebtedness to Western literature sets him apart from many contemporary Japanese authors. Murakami also began translating English works by Raymond Carver, Ursula K. Le Guin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others early in his career. The influence of Western and Russian literature and even popular culture is clearly felt in many of the stories collected in The Elephant Vanishes (take, for instance, the parallels with Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the short story “Sleep”). In his more mature works, such as the novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995), Murakami would become more socially conscious; but already in his early career, Murakami’s writing embraces much of the general absurdity, magic, and isolation of the human condition—stylistic features that are present in some form in all of Murakami’s fiction.