THE
ELEPHANT VANISHES by Haruki Murakami
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1)The
Author
Haruki Murakami was born in
Kyoto, Japan in 1949. The son of two high school Japanese literature teachers,
Murakami became fascinated with American pop culture and started reading works
of American literature. In 1968, he attended Waseda University. After university,
he opened a jazz bar in Tokyo and ran it with his wife for seven years.
Haruki Murakami is interested in
music, cinema, literature and sport. One day after graduating from university,
while watching a baseball game, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write
a novel. Then he left the stadium and started writing his first novel at that
night.
Murakami won the Gunzou
Literature Prize but publishing his first book, “Kaze no uta o'kike” (Hear the Wind Sing) in 1979. With this
prize, the author became aware of his writing passion and continued to write
without interruption. Thanks to this book, Haruki Murakami became one of the
leading names of not only Japanese literature but also World literature.
The author is influenced by
post-modern American writers Kunt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. Because of
that, some critics criticized him negatively. There are comments about that the
characters in his works do not reflect the Japanese culture and lifestyle in
anyway except for their names. Despite ignoring these negative comments, he
settled in New York and left his country in 1986. Then with 'Norwegian Wood',
one of his masterpieces, he became a worldwide known writer and the book has
been translated into 16 languages.
The greatest reason for attracting
the reader to Murakami works which have a post-modern style is that the
characters are mostly intellectual and alone people. The stories which are seen
as the characters of Western literature are highly popular within young
readers. In his works, there is a simple diction for reader and at the same
time stories give a very comprehensive knowledge of art, music and many other
works.
2)Summary
The Elephant Vanishes is a
collection of 17 short stories written between 1980 and 1991. Stories generally
focus on the themes of loneliness, loss, confusion and Murakami uses the style
of surrealism. Surrealism is a 20th century movement in art and literature that
aims to reveal the potential of the conscious and unconscious minds by
producing odd and unreal images or stories. In 'The Elephant Vanishes',
Murakami turns the ordinary things into extraordinary and the visible into the
invisible. The change in size of both elephant and the keeper is a sign of
surrealism in this story.
The story begins with the
unnamed narrator, a public relations executive at a kitchen appliance company
and he tells how he read about the elephant's disappearance in the newspaper.
“The unusual large headline caught my eye: ELEPHANT MISSING IN TOKYO, SUBURB,
and beneath that in type one size smaller, CITIZENS' FEARS MOUNT. SOME CALL FOR
PROBE”. The headline and the reactions of the townspeople for the missing
elephant gets more and more illogical and absurd.
The narrator continues to tell
how the elephant came with its keeper. Because of financial problems, the zoo
locates the animals to other zoos except for an elephant. Since it was too old,
no one wants to take it. The elephant lives alone in the closed zoo until a
solution is found by the town's mayor. After a long process, they reach a consensus
that the town will take care of the elephant and it is located a new elephant
house with its old keeper.
During this part, Murakami
criticizes the modern life, commercialism and urban developments by using a
detached tone. Because the closing of the zoo due to the financial problems and
the developer who bought the land of zoo force the elephant to live in a new
elephant house. Commercial profits change the life of an animal.
“True, I was getting sick of
high-rise condos...” Pg: 312
“...there was a sketch contest
(sketching the elephant thereafter became an integral component of the pupils'
artistic education); and each of two young women in swaying dresses (neither of
whom was especially good-looking) fed the elephant a bunch of bananas. The
elephant endured these virtually meaningless (for the elephant, entirely
meaningless) formalities with hardly a twitch, and it chomped on the bananas
with a vacant stare. When it finished eating the bananas, everyone applauded.”
Pg: 312
There are three major points
about the disappearance of the elephant. Its chain is still secure, there is no
way of escape because of ten feet high fences, and there is no sign of a trail.
Self-Defence Force troops, policeman and even investigators have no explanation
about where the elephant and the keeper are. Day by day, people are getting
less interested in the missing elephant. Everyone continues his daily routines
and starts to forget the disappearing event.
End of September, the narrator
meets a magazine editor at a party of his company. He tells the editor about
the importance of unity and balance in kitchen design. Then the narrator
explains her the disappearance of elephant and says on the evening of May 17th,
while watching the elephant house from the top of a cliff, the size and the
balance of the elephant and its keeper seems odd. The elephant is shrinking or
the keeper is getting larger. There is no other witness, so he cannot tell the
police or investigators in case they will not believe him. He thinks that his
eyes are cheating him. After this conversation, he does not see the editor
again. He continues his job, tries to be a professional though he does not
believe that a kitchen has to have a unity or balance.
The narrator tells the editor
about the importance of unity in kitchen design. Later, the author stresses the
importance of an animal's balance while he talks about the change in the
elephant's and keeper’s size. He actually wants to emphasize the idea that
tradition has lost its proper balance. The urban world is out of balance and
the natural balance has broken down.
“Even most beautifully designed
item dies if it is out of balance with its surroundings.” Pg: 319
3)Characters
There are four major and two
minor characters in the story “Elephant Vanishes”. Major characters are the
narrator, the elephant, Noboru Watanabe and the editor. Minors are the mayor
and the developer.
The main character is the
narrator who tells the story of the disappearance of an old elephant and its
keeper from the Tokyo suburb where he lives. He is unnamed, thirty-one- year-
old man who works for a major manufacturer of electrical appliances. He is
single, lonely man who lives by himself. In the story he keeps a scrapbook,
reads the newspaper from beginning to end, he goes the elephants house whenever
he has leisure time, from all these we understand that he is perfectionist and
fussy person. The narrator makes his obsession with the elephant clear by keeping
a scrapbook of every elephant related newspaper article. He also attended city council meetings to
watch debates over whether or not the town should have an elephant, and once
the elephant had been moved to its house he visited it every chance he got. And also, even though he had quit smoking
three years previously, he started again after the elephant vanished. These all
shows that he is obsessed with the elephant. He may like the elephant but he is
not an animal lover person. We can clearly understand this in the following
state “Still, simply killing the thing the thing would have been out of the
question. If it had been a spider monkey or a bat, they might have been able to
get away with it, but the killing of an elephant would have been too hard to
cover up…” (310, 2nd paragraph) In this quotation he reveals his minds about
the elephant’s problem by saying these cruel words like it is okay for him to
kill a small animal.
The Elephant is another major
character in the story. It is unnamed and symbolic character representing an
old way of life. Throughout the story, no one knows how it disappeared with the
keeper therefore it is a mysterious character. Its exact age is not known but
we know through the story that it arrived in the town from East Africa
twenty-two years before it disappeared. Therefore we can guess how old it is.
Its agedness gives it trouble that it cannot be transported to another zoo when
the town's zoo closes.
Another major character and the
only named character in the story is Noboru Watanabe. He is he is the sixty
three-year-old, small, bony zookeeper who has cared for the elephant for over
ten years. The narrator describes him as a "silent, lonely-looking old
man" who takes care of all the elephant's needs and lives in a prefabricated
house attached to the elephants house. He is generally kind to children who
come to see the elephant, and the zoo authorities describe him as knowledgeable
and trustworthy. He is friendly person and this is clearly stated in the story
that “If someone spoke to him, he would reply and expressed himself clearly”
(313, 2nd paragraph). He is also a mysterious character throughout the story
with the elephant, no one knows how it disappeared with the elephant.
The last major character is the
editor who is also unnamed and she is an editor of a magazine for young
housewives. She is intelligent and curious twenty-six year-old woman. Meeting
the narrator at a party she appears in the second part of the story. She is
having a conversation with the narrator, they have things in common and as the
conversation continues they starts to like each other. Later, when the narrator
talk about the missing elephants the atmosphere changes and telling that I
never should have told you about the elephant, the narrator feels unsecured.
Mayor is one of a minor character in the story. He is the Mayor of the town
where narrator lives and is also the director of the negotiating of the
elephant’s problem that will end up with the decisions of the town would take
charge of the elephant. The other minor character is the developer. He is just
a guy who is planning to put up a high rise condo building in the land of old
zoo.
4)Symbols
In the story, there are three
obvious symbols that represent different things. The first one is the keeper
and the elephants. The construction of high-rise condominiums sets the events
of the story in motion. These condos replace the old zoo, forcing the elephant
to be relocating to a new elephant house. Thus, both character become a symbol
of former ways of life and sensitive relationships which are being pushed aside
by accommodation endeavors. The second symbol is steel cuff which symbolizes
people who try to hold on to yesteryears. With the shackles being left alone
alter the "disappearance, likewise, the people holding on to the
yesteryears are left behind" by change. The third symbols is Scrapbook
which symbolizes people who forget missing elephant day by day. The writer
keeps a scrapbook on the news of the elephant. Whenever he finds any article
about the elephant, he clips them all and he pastes them in his scrapbook. Thus
he destroy all the information about the elephant and people starts forget
them.
5)PLOT
Exposition: When the story
opens, the old elephant is adopted by the town because its original owner is
unable to find the animal a new home when the zoo closed.
Rising
Action:
The elephant and its keeper disappears mysteriously.
Climax: The narrator
obsessed with the elephants. So, he watches the elephant and its keeper
constantly from the cliff. The narrator sees the change elephant's size
compared to its keeper.
Falling
Action:
The narrator tells everything that he saw from the cliff to a woman. After
that, they never meet again.
Resolution: The narrator goes on
his/her life without questioning cases anymore and his/her perspectives change.
6)THEMES
Isolation
In the story, the
narrator spends most of his time alone, engaging in solitary activities. His
only direct encounter is with another isolated individual, the magazine editor.
He is single and childless, as is she. Although he finds her attractive, which
almost makes him reach out to her but unfortunately he finds himself unable to
break out of his deepening isolation.
The old elephant and its keeper,
Watanabe, are another pair of childless individuals. The animal was brought
from a distant land to live out its last years in a cage, isolated from others
of its kind. The old keeper, by choosing to live within the elephant house, has
no family and sees no other place for himself in society. He entirely devoted
to himself the old elephant.
Imbalance
One of the major themes in this
story is the idea of things being out of balance. This theme is introduced when
the narrator tells the editor about the importance of unity in kitchen design,
as he states "Even the most beautifully designed item dies if it is out of
balance with its surroundings." The narrator later emphasizes the
importance of balance between a creature and its environment when he talks
about witnessing the change in the elephant's size compared to its keeper.
Reality
and Appearances
Linked to the theme of imbalance
is the comparison between reality and appearances. The reporter that is
covering the strange occurrence tries very hard to maintain the false
impression that the elephant simply escaped, when the facts surrounding the
whole thing points to none other than a supernatural vanishing. The narrator
points out that is indeed strange and continues to observe that all of the
townspeople try to hide behind a similar guise of normality.
7)CONFLICT
There is a conflict between the
narrator and society since the narrator criticizes that the zoo of the town is
sold to a developer to be replaced by the construction of high-rise condo. That
is, he emphasizes that the elephant in the zoo could be homeless because of the
construction. Also, he criticizes that people forgot vanishing of the elephant in
a month. People were beginning to shove elephant event into the large category
of unsolvable mysteries. Thus, he thinks society tended to forget event they
could not solve.
There is a conflict between the
narrator and himself since he is obsessed with the vanishing of an old elephant
and its keeper so he could not focus on himself. For instance, he met a woman
and they realized they had some mutual points until he started telling the
story of the elephant. Normally, the woman felt he is interesting and they do
not see each other anymore. The quotation ‘I would begin to think I wanted to
do something, but then I would become incapable of distinguishing between the
probable results of doing it and of not doing it.’ Tells he could not do
something although he tried to focus on his life. Since, he lost his balance
after vanishing of the elephant and its keeper.
There is a conflict between the
keeper and society because the old keeper chose to live within the elephant
house, he has no family and he does not see a place for himself in society.
8)IRONY
The elephant is reported to have
escaped in the newspaper but there is no any evidence about escaping because
the first reason is that elephant’s leg had been fastened with a steel cuff.
The other one is the route of escape. The elephant’s house was surrounded by a
massive fence. That is, there was no way the elephant could escape from this
enclosure. The last one is elephant’s footprint. There is no any footprint on the
hill. Briefly, there is no proof although reporters think elephant escaped.
The other irony is the narrator
claims that the old elephant and its keeper’s size have become more equal but
it is impossible. Probably, it can be an illusion since he has a balance
problem.
9)MOTIFS
Murakami uses water as a motif,
to emphasize reader’s awareness of disappearance. The water motif conveys a
sense of missing things into water. Since eater can vaporize into air and this
mirrors the vanishing. ‘Amid the endless surge and ebb of everyday life,
interest in a missing elephant could not last forever’
Murakami indicates the rain into
the reader to tell a sense of gloom and sadness. ‘A few short months without its elephant had
given the place an air of doom and desolation that hung there like a huge,
oppressive rain cloud.’
10)CONCLUSION
Briefly, the story is told by an
unnamed narrator who wakes up to read a newspaper including the disappearance
of the town’s elephant and its keeper. The narrator has been affected by the
elephant and he tells her about the story of missing elephants. He also tells
her that the size of them changed and became more equal. Before the elephant
vanished, the narrator reached a balance in his inside but after the elephant
vanishes, his balance is broken up.
The narrator discovers that he
cannot decide differences between reality and appearance thus he questions his
own perception.
And the last subject of the
story is difference between tradition and modernity. When the story is written,
an economic boom came out in japan, 1980s. Murakami sets the construction of
high rise condos in his story. The zoo must be demolished to make high rise
buildings and these buildings replaced the zoo. This means an urbanization of
japan. But Murakami supports the idea that modern life is absurd and
people in town should not forget their former value like elephant. Because the
elephant and its keeper mirror former ways of life, sincere relationship and
tradition. Thus, he followed information and news about them even if they
vanished.
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