The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

“Somewhere, in my head, in my body, in my very existence, it’s as if there were some long-lost subterranean element that’s been skewing my life ever so slightly off.”

The narrator’s Existential Anxiety in the Modern World comes through very clearly in this passage, an existential anxiety reflected in his decision to quit his job and his subsequent state of uncertainty. The narrator’s feeling that there is something “off” about his life is something he shares with many of Murakami’s narrators (compare Quote 25, where the narrator of “The Elephant Vanishes” admits at the end of the story that he feels as though “a kind of balance” in him has been thrown off).

“A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind up the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.”

The narrator conceives of the world in metaphorical analogy to the otherwise unidentified “wind-up bird” (he does not know what the bird is really called), an idea that reflects his dissatisfaction with the repetitive routine of his life. Behind this existential anxiety, as often, is a fear of death, imagined here as a corporeal and almost tumor-like mass “swelling inside me” whose result is non-being (even as the rest of the world continues to exist, indefinite and indifferent).

“I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.”

The first sentences of this story highlight the passive and indecisive character of the narrator, who seems to live by a very fatalistic credo (“we never choose anything at all”).