The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s not surprising that Murakami has received the Franz Kafka Prize. His great talent lies in his ability to tell a story where the mundane routine of everyday life subtly slips into the realm of the fantastic and bizarre, but in a way that seems perfectly reasonable to the reader. Monsters, dwarfs, “TV People” suddenly appear and prey on the deepest insecurities and fears of the denizens of Metropolitan Tokyo.
In many of these stories, characters are disconnected from the “normal” human experience, developing fixations with seemingly trivial topics or obsessions with people they hardly know. Often they become slowly unhinged and perform irrational or violent acts.
A young housewife is unable to sleep for seventeen straight days, with no obvious explanation and her mind undergoes a bizarre transofrmation. A suddenly hungry man decides to steal bread from a bakery, an event which he is destined to repeat later in life. A young man just out of college takes a job with a professional letter-writing firm, which seems to exist mostly to satisfy the loneliness of housewives and single people and then, by agreeing to have dinner with one of the clients, briefly enters her sad life. Similarly, a man whose job is to write consoling letters to disgruntled customers of a department store, whose policy did not allow them to return the merchandise they had purchased, develops an excessive attachment to a woman whose letter of complaint he has read and has touched him for some reason. Or a wealthy, successful man who has the psychological need to, every few months, burn down a disused barn.
While their thoughts and actions are often bizarre, they are deeply sympathetic and relatable characters. These are stories of loneliness and isolation and the need for human connections in an increasingly competitive, technological world.