The Elephant vanishes

In “The Elephant Vanishes Stories” by Haruki Murakami, he uses a mixture of fantasy and reality to engage the reader into the main idea of object or people disappearing. Most of his stories may seen as if they came from life but he adds mystery to each one of them when something is missing or vanishes and the circumstances around it becomes unreal.

In “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” Murakami starts off by surrounding the plot around a man who quits his job for no apparent reason at all, who irons his shirts in a particular manner, and avoid the sexual urges of a woman. With these traits this can be fairly odd and he spends his day looking for a cat. The reader has no clue as to where the cat was and how his wife knew that if could possibly be in the abandoned house not to far down. She states, “My guess is that the cat’s probably in the yard of that vacant house at the end of the passage.” (Pg. 9) In this story the cat disappears and the girl who tried to help him find it has disappeared. Murakami leads the reader to believe this is reality even though [we] do not know if it is or not and no one will ever know. In this particular story it does not matter whether it is fantasy or reality because when it comes to short stories every possible detail cannot be convey in just a couple pages, something are bound to be left out on the author’s part.

Another one of Haruki Murakami’s story “The Little Green Monster” is also a cross between fantasy and reality, but mostly fantasy. The narrator, whom is a woman, notices a green monster coming out of her oak tree. In reality little green monsters do not come from out of trees that could “read minds” and speak of how much they loved someone. This is completely fantasy but it is very interesting of how Murakami has changed his usual narrator of a man to a woman to show how love could come from just about anywhere in different shapes and forms and be denied.