The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

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“TV People”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“TV People” Summary

One Sunday evening, the “TV People” come to the narrator’s apartment. He explains that the TV People are just like ordinary people, except that they are about 20-30% smaller. Three TV People enter the apartment and install a television on the sideboard, ignoring the narrator and disorganizing his wife’s magazines. The TV People turn on the television and flip through the channels, all of which are blank. Eventually, the TV People turn off the television and leave the apartment, never having said a single word.

The narrator’s wife says nothing about the television when she comes home, which the narrator finds odd. He himself checks on the television a few times, but the channels are always blank. At work, the narrator continues to encounter TV People. One day, during a meeting, he sees the TV People carrying a television into the conference room before leaving. But when the narrator mentions this to a colleague who was at the meeting with him, the man begins avoiding him.

One day, the narrator’s wife does not come home. Instead, the narrator sees the TV People on the television screen. One of them emerges from the screen and explains that they are making an airplane. The narrator is skeptical and wonders what is going on but is too tired to do anything. The TV People “rep” tells him that the phone will ring in five minutes.

“TV People” Analysis

This story explores the relationship between Perception Versus Reality. On the surface, the narrator seems to be suffering from visual and auditory hallucinations. The TV People, whom the narrator describes as being 20-30% smaller than ordinary people, do not seem “real” in the standard sense and are apparently seen only by the narrator (thus, the narrator’s colleague avoids him when he mentions them to him, and the narrator’s wife does not acknowledge the television that the narrator had seen the TV People install in their apartment), but the story goes further, interrogating the very nature of reality and the extent to which one can trust their own perception. The narrator very clearly sees and hears the TV People, to the point that it does not even occur to him to doubt their existence—if anything, their presence makes him doubt his own existence:

Not to excuse myself, but you have people right in front of you denying your very presence like that, then see if you don’t doubt whether you actually exist. I look at my hands half expecting to see clear through them (202).

The isolation the narrator feels at being the only one to perceive the TV People signals a sense of Existential Anxiety in the Modern World. The failure of the narrator’s wife to acknowledge the television thus becomes “creepy” (202)—after all, the narrator can see it clearly “right in front of [him]” (204). Also strange is the fact that the narrator’s colleagues ignore the TV People when they interrupt a meeting to carry a television around the conference room, even though the narrator makes a point of noting that some of them make room for the intruders. The narrator does not even doubt the existence of the TV People when he sees one of them emerge from the television to speak with him. Murakami’s story seems to be asking, If we cannot believe our perceptions, what can we believe?

The surreal, schizophrenic quality of the narrator’s experiences is emphasized through Murakami’s repeated references to sound and his frequent use of onomatopoeia. He mimics the dragging sounds the narrator hears—“KRZSHAAAL KKRZSHAAAAAL…” (196)—the sound of the people walking in the hall—“KRRSPUMK DUWB…” (197)—and the sound of the narrator’s clock—“TRPP Q SCHAOUS…” (199). These stylistic devices serve to make the narrator’s perceptions—and their unreliability—more immediate and vivid to the reader.