The elephant disappears

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The Elephant Disappears is a book by Haruki Murakami .

The collection was originally published in English by Knopf in 1993 as The Elephant Vanishes with 17 short stories that were originally published between 1980 and 1991 in various Japanese magazines. The Japanese version was published by Shinchōsha in 2005.

In 1995, Nora Bierich published a translation of eight short stories as The Elephant Disappears in Berlin-Verlag , including the eponymous story.

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The winder and the Tuesday woman

Japanese: Nejimakidori to Kayōbi no Onnatachi ( ね じ ま き 鳥 と 火曜日 の 女 た ち ). In: Shinchō , 1/1986.

While the narrator is cooking spaghetti, a woman calls him who hangs up shortly afterwards. Then he quits his job and registers unemployed. After a while he is called again by the same woman, who this time makes sexual innuendos. The narrator hangs up, but the doorbell rings non-stop. In the meantime he starts looking for his cat that has escaped, which he stops unsuccessfully. Meanwhile, the phone continues to ring, but that doesn't bother him anymore.

The Bakery Heist / The Second Bakery Heist

Japanese: Pan-ya Shūgeki ( パ ン 屋 再襲 撃 ). In: Marie Claire (Japan), 8/1985.

Main article: The bakery robberies

The narrator raids a bakery while studying. Years later, he and his wife find themselves in a similar situation.

sleep

Japanese: Nemuri ( 眠 り ). In: Bungakukai , 11/1989.

The story is written from the perspective of a female first-person narrator. At first she suffers from chronic fatigue, then the condition is reversed. You learn that she is happily married to a dentist and has a son with him. She is also proud of her own car, an old Honda City. She tries to get out of the state of insomnia by reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina at night , eating chocolate and drinking Rémy Martin. She suddenly realizes that her sleeping son's facial features are similar to his father and realizes in this that as an adult he will develop the same self-righteous character traits. From that point on, she can no longer love her son wholeheartedly. One night she drives out of town in her car. In a parking lot, shadows approach their car while it no longer starts.

The fall of the Roman Empire, the Indian uprising of 1881, Hitler's invasion of Poland and the storm world

Japanese: Roma Teikoku no Hokai, 1881-nen Indian Hoki, Hitler no Poland shinnyu, Soshite Kyofu Sekai ( ローマ帝国の崩壊·一八八一年のインディアン蜂起·ヒットラーのポーランド侵入·そして強風世界 ~ Hittorā no Pōrando ~ ). In: Gekkan Kadokawa , 1/1986.

The first-person narrator keeps a diary and has an idiosyncratic system for remembering personal experiences: he connects impressions with historical events. He connects the calm on a Sunday with the mood at the end of the Roman Empire. The ringing of the telephone reminds him of the howling of the Indians. In the film Sophie's Choice he saw Hitler's incursion into Poland in one scene. At the end of the story, the first-person narrator informs the reader about his bizarre mnemonic system.

Burning down the barn

Japanese: Naya o Yaku ( 納 屋 を 焼 く ). In: Shinchō , 1/1983.

At a party where joints are consumed, the first-person narrator meets a man who claims that he is setting barns on fire. When the narrator asks his motive, he says that the barns were just waiting to be set on fire. The narrator now goes in search of barns in his vicinity. Even after a year none of them burned down.

Cargo ship to China

Japanese: Chūgoku Iki no Slow Boat ( 中国 行 き の ス ロ ウ ・ ボ ー ト ~ Surō Bōto ). In: Umi , 4/1980.

The first-person narrator reports on his experiences with the Chinese in Japan. The first experience took place in 1959/60, when he had to attend a Chinese school in Japan and learned that both Chinese and Japanese differ only in their individuality. His second experience during his student days was when he met a Chinese girl whom he accidentally let go in the wrong direction on the Yamanote Railway. After he apologized to her, she says that the Chinese are undesirable in Japan anyway. His third experience was with a schoolmate who sells encyclopedias to Japanese people of Chinese descent.

The elephant disappears

Japanese: Zō no Shōmetsu ( 象 の 消滅 ). In: Bungakukai , 8/1985.

An elephant breaks out of a zoo. After discussions in the press about the bureaucratic responsibility, the city finally takes over the elephant and builds an elephant house for it. When the elephant escapes a second time, the first-person narrator notices that the body proportions of the elephant to its keeper have shifted and the elephant seems to have become smaller, while the keeper seems to have grown. After a while, the elephant is no longer a topic of conversation.

criticism

“Humorous and witty stories like this probably best correspond to Murakami's narrative talent, his laconic, light-footed narrative style. The romantic-tinged contemporary stories, such as the one about the "wind-up bird and the Tuesday women", which rely on rather banal gags, read less convincingly. However, the stories are entertaining and skilfully told, and their entertainment value is not to be underestimated. "

- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

literature

  • Haruki Murakami: The elephant is disappearing . Translated from the Japanese by Nora Bierich. Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin, 2003, ISBN 3-8333-0068-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 村上 春樹 『象 の 消滅 - 短篇 選集 1980-1991』 . Shinchōsha, accessed September 18, 2019 (Japanese).
  2. ↑ https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensions/belletristik/rezension-belletristik-der-grosse-broetchencoup-11319774.html