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“Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” by Haruki Murakami

The fantastical tale “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” is another story by Murakami that distorts reality and questions what is real and what is imaginary. In this story, a giant frog seeks to recruit an ordinary man into a fight against earthworms that threaten to destroy Tokyo. Both “The Elephant Vanishes” and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” are typical Murakami tales but are in some ways opposite. While “The Elephant Vanishes” seems like a simple, realistic tale on the surface but offers a surreal twist, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” is filled with magical and fantastical details that are shadowed by glimpses of “reality.”

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was one of the foremost authors of the original surrealist movement. His work may very well have inspired Murakami’s, as Murakami often writes “Kafkaesque” plots in his novels and stories. One of Murakami’s novels is even titled Kafka on the Shore. Kafka’s famous 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, which tells the tale of a man who awakens one day to find himself transformed into a giant insect, mixes together the mundane details of reality with the astonishing and unexpected. This mixture of reality and absurdity also appears in “The Elephant Vanishes.” Both stories use strange events that interrupt reality to investigate the values society holds most dear.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The postmodern writer Kurt Vonnegut was another huge influence on Murakami’s writing style and themes. This influence can be traced in Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969 as Murakami attended university and became interested in postmodernism. Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a character who becomes unglued from reality and travels throughout time and space. Throughout the story, he recalls his horrific experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II and he endures bizarre situations like being held captive by aliens. In both Vonnegut’s and Murakami’s stories, there is a sense of loneliness as both Billy Pilgrim and Murakami’s narrator struggle to convey the astonishing things they have experienced to the people around them.

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