The Elephant Vanishes By Murrakami

Haruki Murakami’s collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes, depicts the experience of fictional Japanese characters and the society in which they belong. The style of magical realism frees Murakami to use motifs far from the ordinary such as the disappearance of a cat up to an entire elephant to illustrate purposelessness. This motif of disappearance is seen mainly in stories such as “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” “The Elephant Vanishes”, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” and “Sleep”. Murakami uses motifs of animals, humans and objects disappearing to convey a lack of purpose, isolation, and emptiness.

The animals in the stories follow the trend of disappearing mysteriously and through this,

Although the disappearance of the cat itself doesn’t cause the narrator’s aimless state it leads the narrator to the passage and therefore to the realization that he spends his life with inconsequential tasks and never accomplishes anything worthwhile. Murakami associates the search for the disappearing animal with the search of something greater such as a purpose in life. The same sense of purposelessness is seen in “The Elephant Vanishes”. The protagonist’s town is famous for owning an elephant however, one day the elephant vanishes. This incident provides the narrator with a purpose in life as he develops an obsession to discover how the elephant has disappeared. Despite his efforts, the whereabouts of the elephant remain unknown and the elephant case is integrated into the category of “unsolvable mysteries” (318). A few months after the disappearance he reflects upon the town without their elephant; “People seem to have forgotten that their town once owned an elephant. The grass took over the elephant enclosure has withered now and the area has the feel of winter” (327). The mysterious disappearance of the elephant does not have a direct impact on the

Rather than vanishing without any explanation, the disappearance of the non-living is through their destruction. Murakami uses the motif of objects disappearing to reveal a deviation from ordinary habits, which causes an internal emptiness. In “Sleep”, the narrator is a married woman suppressing her true self and following the same uneventful routine everyday. One day, she has a nightmare and cannot sleep ever again. During the first sleepless night she conveys her feelings as: “Something inside me died. Something melted away, leaving only a shuddering vacuum. An explosive flash incinerated everything my existence depended on” (83). Through her thought process, it is seen that by eradicating her sleep routine she is left in with internal void. The death, the narrator describes, is the death of her emotions leaving nothing but a vacuum of blankness inside her. The death of her emotions only leaves her physical body, she now fails to bear common human characteristics of emotion, responsiveness and empathy. The sense of emptiness is conveyed through this internal blankness as the narrator doesn’t avoid emotions but rather her emotions cease to exist with the eradication of her sleep. Murakami’s word choice of “melted away” and “shuddering vacuum”, while illustrating the narrator’s internal desolation, depict the destruction of her emotions leaving only a colossal void in her mind. She