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Product Description

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17650 in Books
• Published on: 1994-06-28
• Released on: 1994-06-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 7.98" h x .72" w x 5.20" l, .56 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The virtuoso Japanese novelist presents 17 playful and darkly comic existentialist conundrums.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This collection of 15 stories from a popular Japanese writer, perhaps best known in this country for A Wild Sheep Chase ( LJ 11/15/89), gives a nice idea of his breadth of style. The work maintains the matter-of-fact tone reminiscent of American detective fiction, balancing itself somewhere between the spare realism of Raymond Carver and the surrealism of Kobo Abe. These are not the sort of stories that one thinks of as "Japanese"; the intentionally Westernized style and well-placed reference to pop culture gives them a contemporary and universal feel. Engaging, thought-provoking, humorous, and slyly profound, these skillful stories will easily appeal to American readers but must present something of a challenge to the Japanese cultural establishment. At their best, however, they serve to dispel cultural stereotypes and reveal a common humanity. Recommended for libraries with an interest in contemporary fiction.
- Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A seamless melding of Japanese cultural nuances with universal themes--in a virtuoso story collection from rising literary star Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1991). These 15 pieces, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy, are narrated by different characters who nonetheless share similar sensibilities and attitudes. At home within their own urban culture, they happily pick and choose from Western cultural artifacts as varied as Mozart tapes, spaghetti dinners, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts in a terrain not so much surreal as subtly out of kilter, and haunted by the big questions of death, courage, and love. In the title story, the narrator--who does p.r. for a kitchen-appliance maker and who feels that ``things around [him] have lost their balance,'' that a ``pragmatic approach'' helps avoid complicated problems--is troubled by the inexplicable disappearance of a local elephant and his keeper. In another notable story, ``Sleep,'' a young mother, unable to sleep, begins to question not only her marriage and her affection for her child, but death itself, which may mean ``being eternally awake and staring into darkness.'' Stories like ``TV People,'' in which a man's apartment is taken over by TV characters who ``look as if they were reduced by photocopy, everything mechanically calibrated''; ``Barn Burning,'' in which a man confesses to burning barns (it helps him keep his sense of moral balance); and ``The Second Bakery Attack,'' in which a young married couple rob a McDonald's of 30 Big Macs in order to exorcise the sense of a ``weird presence'' in their lives--all exemplify Murakami's sense of the fragility of the ordinary world. Remarkable evocations of a postmodernist world, superficially indifferent but transformed by Murakami's talent into a place suffused with a yearning for meaning. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.