The Elephant Vanishes
U.S. First edition cover
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| Editor | Gary Fisketjon |
|---|---|
| Author | Haruki Murakami |
| Original title | 象の消滅 Zō no shōmetsu |
| Translator | Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Genre | Short story collection |
| Published | March 31, 1993 (Knopf) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 327 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 26805691 |
| LC Class | PL856.U673 E44 1993 |
The Elephant Vanishes (象の消滅 Zō no shōmetsu?) is a collection of 17 short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The stories were written between 1980 and 1991, and published in Japan in various magazines, then collections. The contents of this compilation were selected by Gary Fisketjon (Murakami's editor at Knopf) and first published in English translation in 1993 (its Japanese counterpart was released later in 2005). Several of the stories had already appeared (often with alternate translations) in the magazines The New Yorker, Playboy, and The Magazine (Mobil Corp.) before this compilation was published.
Stylistically and thematically, the collection aligns with Murakami's previous work. The stories mesh normality with surrealism, and focus on painful issues involving loss, destruction, confusion and loneliness. The title for the book is derived from the final story in the collection.
Many of the stories in the collection have been published previously in Japanese periodicals (not listed here), then translated in literary magazines (mentioned below). The stories are listed in the order in which they appear in the book.
While the list above details which stories appeared before the publication of The Elephant Vanishes, many of the stories have also appeared elsewhere more recently:
The British theatre company Complicite collaborated with Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre to produce a stage adaptation also entitled The Elephant Vanishes. The production featured three of the stories in Murakami's collection ("Sleep," "The Second Bakery Attack," and the title story). Directed by Simon McBurney and starring a Japanese cast, the play opened in May, 2003, in Tokyo before touring internationally in limited festival runs. The performance was in Japanese with English supertitles.
The show incorporated a great deal of multimedia, which Complicite had traditionally eschewed, but married it with the company's trademark communal storytelling and demanding physical performance style. The eponymous elephant, for example, was represented at one time by a magnified eye on a video screen, and at another time by four live actors bent over office chairs. This combination of technical wizardry and compelling human narrative received high praise from critics, who also cited the play's humor, realism, and dreamlike motion a fitting tribute to Murakami's prose.
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