The Elephant Vanishes: About Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1949 and raised mostly in the cosmopolitan port city of Kobe, where his mother and father both taught Japanese literature. Murakami’s childhood was spent in the traumatic wake of World War II. The Japanese had surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, after atomic bombs were detonated over the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Earlier that year, half of Tokyo had burned, and American firebombs had killed more than 100,000 Japanese. After the war, the United States occupied and ruled Japan from 1945 until 1952. Murakami was thus born during an intense period of self-examination by the Japanese as they attempted to redefine their national identity while living under an increasingly dominant American presence.

In 1968, Murakami went to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, where he studied dramatic literature. Murakami’s love for popular music was well established by the time he graduated. He worked at a record store during college and eventually opened a jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat, which he ran for seven years. Murakami didn’t write his first novel until he was almost thirty. According to a now well-worn anecdote, Murakami was watching a baseball game when an American player named Dave Hilton hit a double. At the moment Hilton’s bat made contact with the ball, Murakami claims, he knew he could write a novel. Murakami wrote his first book, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), at nights after closing the bar and submitted it for the Gunzou Literature prize for emerging authors. He won first prize. Hear the Wind Sing became the first part of a series known as “The Rat Trilogy,” which also includes Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). His novel Norwegian Wood (1987), a bittersweet story about sexual revolution in 1960s Tokyo (with a title that alludes to a Beatles’ song), became a runaway bestseller in Japan, particularly among younger readers, and catapulted Murakami to a new level of fame.

From 1980 to 1991, Murakami wrote seventeen short stories which were eventually published into a collection, The Elephant Vanishes. These stories—which include the titular “The Elephant Vanishes”—play with reality and were likely inspired by Murakami’s interest in postmodern writing. He developed this interest while studying at Waseda University two decades earlier. Because of his high level of popularity in the United States—a level unmatched by most international writers—some of these stories, translated by Jay Rubin, appeared in high-profile American magazines. The Elephant Vanishes, the collection of these stories, received an English translation printing by a major publisher (Knopf) in 1993. Even later on, many of his shorter works appeared in major publications such as The New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s.

Along with his short story collections, Murakami’s novels regularly receive high-profile reviews before landing comfortably on bestseller lists. For Western readers, Murakami’s work can be a bracing blend of the familiar and exotic. Although his stories generally take place in Japan and almost always feature Japanese characters, those characters often display a thorough grounding in American popular culture. References to rock music and Western philosophers abound, as do nods to American consumer culture—KFC mascot Colonel Sanders even has a small but pivotal role in Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore (2002; translated into English in 2005).

Murakami’s narratives continuously balance the mundane and strange. His writing style is plain and unadorned, and his protagonists are usually ordinary middle-class men who remain passive and unobtrusive until pushed into action by external forces. This flatness, however, is often paired with a strong sense of the surreal. In Murakami’s stories, animals speak, ghosts return from the grave, and parallel universes exist calmly in the shadows of our own.

Next section Historical Context: Postmodern Japan and Endangered Animal Species