The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Elephant Vanishes: Stories
Book Review: Me and Murakami
Summary: 5 Stars
One of my favourite Japanese writers. There is no one else who can write about loneliness the way he does. Murakami's collection of stories is simply superb! I was struggling to find a good blip from this book, one that will give a proper sense of Murakami's style and material. It's a problem, because when I pick something out of context, it sounds plain and ordinary. If I pick something from his dream-like sequences it sounds kitschy. This would be messing with the impact of his stories, which aren't even close to being simple or over-cute... Profound is a better description fo Murakami's work, and mystic in an urban, understated kind of way. The Washington Post Book Review says (on the book cover) that Murakami "takes big risks." and one can see why they might say that. My strong impression is that fully half of his stories are drawn from his dreams, and you know how wonky dreams can get. His work often takes a sudden shift, or it stops, without full resolution. But it's okay, dangling bits can add to the richness of a good story. The story titles are quite illustrative:-The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women -Sleep -The Fall of The Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and The Realm of Raging Winds -The Little Green Monster -TV People -The Dancing Dwarf
Aside from these dream-like stories he's got more matter-of-fact ones (see more titles below). One of Marukami's strengths is that he can write a story almost as one tells one in conversation, starting with the bit that made you think of it in the first place, mentioning 'real life' asides and in the process including the reader in a subtle and complex experience.
Book Review: Very weird. . .
Summary: 4 Stars
This was my fourth Haruki Murakami book I have read, and of the four it was my least favorite. The only reason I believe this book to be my least favorite is because I enjoy nove length tales more than short stories. The storis in this book range from heart warming to extraordinarily odd. My favorite stories from the book were "The Bakery Attack" which dealt with a young couple holding up a McDonald's, "Sleep" which dealt with a woman who could not fall asleep for a very long period of time and how she spent those extra hours given to her life, and "Family Affair" which is the story that seems most down to earth of the collection and makes one think of Norwegian Wood.Book Review: Japan, with fries.
Summary: 4 Stars
A fabulous, if a bit uneven collection of stories from one of the modern masters of fiction. The first story, "The Wind-Up Bird..." is the first chapter from his spectacular novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles." All the characters in these stories are vaguely cynical, listless inhabitants of postmodern Tokyo - the city, as well as its people, are cosmopolitan and hyper-westernized, and many of the stories deal with discomforting lack of certainty and stability of the existence in such a world. People disappear, monsters plead for love, and real people act/talk as though they were characters in jaded fables. You might think Murakami's doing a version of magic realism, but he's more sly than that: no matter how fabulous events seem to be, the characters, the exacting details of the events, the dead-on metaphors/themes ground all the stories firmly to reality. The stories are a blast to read as well. When a hungry couple pulls a heist of a McDonald's and steal 20 big-macs, they politely pay for their two drinks and walk out. ("Bakery Attack") Trust me. You have to read it.Book Review: stories by turns eerie and funny and touching
Summary: 4 Stars
The Elephant Vanishes is a grand collection of short stories from Haruki Murakami. They vary in length, from a few pages to 30+ pages, but they all bear the Murakamiesque stamps of eerieness, humor, and compassion. In the title story, an elephant vanishes from a public enclosure, as does his keeper. It seems like a simple mistake; couldn't his keeper have just stolen him, and left town? Couldn't the elephant have run away, and the keeper is just searching for him? (these occur to the reader, but they're not offered by the narrator or a character...) But towards the end of the story, our narrator offers us a few bizarre details. Yes, the elephant vanished all right. And he knows it vanished. Murakami's description of this is amazing.
Other stories involve a late night robbery of a fast food restaurant (of food, not money), a man on the last day of his lawn-mowing job, and a woman who witnesses a small green monster emerge from the soil of her front yard.
One of my favorites involves a woman who has gone weeks without sleep. She reads Anna Karenina at night. During the days, she lives as she always did, and her husband and son are oblivious to her insomnia. A very strange fate befalls her.
If you've read some of Murakami's novels, but you haven't read THE ELEPANT VANISHES, you owe it to yourself to give this book a chance. The stories are just great. If you haven't yet read Haruki Murakami, this collection is actually a pretty good place to start.
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Book Review: The Disconnected Ordinary Everyman
Summary: 3 Stars
Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes" does not reveal its coherence until the title story finishes the 327th page. This is a discussion about the shifting perspectives of man and woman in traditional society. Once the man loomed larger than women, but, like the elephant and his trainer, this notion has vanished from view. Murakami pauses to acknowledge and ponder.Many of the male characters in this collections of 17 short stories are stay-at-home husbands married to career-oriented wives. Whether house-sitting, working around the house, or tempted by younger women, these men deal with their sexual urges and emotions without help from traditional norms. Other characters explore their awakening sexual urges, sometimes destructively, other times formatively. The female characters are strong, confident, and often unsupportive and seductively teasing.
This collection is also a more than a less book. The narrative voice is verbose and unchecked. This is a selfish narration, typically masculine, oblivious of utility or artfulness. But it is also honest. The stories are full of tidbits of erudition, excessive detail, and, sometimes, usefulness. It is more tape recorded psychology project than vision.
However, culturally, the collection is sterile. it is not informative about Japanese norms and developments. Murakami's characters are typically middle-class, urban, cosmopolitan, and ordinary. This is not a sourcebook, to learn about Japanese attitudes, but a document chronicling the leveling effects of globalization. In many ways, it is as disturbing in its sterility as it is in its conclusions.