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My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at 6:13. I went to the kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read. I’m one of those people who read the paper from beginning to end, in order, so it took me awhile to get to the article about the vanishing elephant.

In these sentences from the first paragraph of the story, Murakami drops hints about the narrator’s personality and defining characteristics. The narrator’s daily routine shows that he clearly values order, logic, and predictability. The alarm clock time, 6:13 every day, is so specific that it hints at an eccentricity within the narrator as well. The way he reads the newspaper each morning is also revealing. The narrator has been following the story of the elephant obsessively for months. Many who were so fixated on a story would likely skim the paper to see if there was any information on the elephant and then read about it, but the narrator’s need for order and routine compels him to start at the beginning of the paper and read to the end, as he does every day. This is a man who relies on and values order, logic, and predictability above all else.

I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me. Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomenon to strike my eye in a strange way. It’s probably something in me.

This quote occurs during the resolution of the story, as the narrator ponders life in a world without the elephant. By this point, the narrator has undergone a dramatic transformation in his outlook on the world. While still technically living in the pragmatic world via his work, the narrator now finds himself off-balance ever since he witnessed the elephant and keeper vanish. The orderly, predictable life he used to value is gone forever. Now, he can’t predict what’s going to happen in the new, nonsensical world he inhabits, and he feels lost. Just as he observed the keeper and elephant lose their balance in the moments before their disappearance, everything around him has lost its balance now, too. And like the elephant and its keeper, the narrator now inhabits a different world.

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