Rating: 
Summary: << The essence of the unnatural life >>
Review: 17 modern, magical, urbanic hilarious tales.
It's the first Murakami book I've read, and from now on I got addicted to his books. Murakami 's deadpan genius. King of the bizarre realm.
His stories take place in Japan, but could as well be everywhere else.
I found myself enthralled by the way he writes, captivated
To his ideas, fascinated by his way to see the unnatural in a so natural way.
The confusion of the young people in his stories is funny, touching and so familiar. Everything could happen; anything is for real if you can see it in your head. Everyone's normal, just the circumstances aren't...
It left me with the taste and desire for more! One by one I swallowed all of his other books.
I had never got disappointed from any of the others, but I found these short stories as the essence of all that I like about his books, and I keep reading it again and again.
Rating: 
Summary: Japan, with fries.
Review: A fabulous, if a bit uneven collection of stories from one of the modern masters of fiction. The first story, "The Wind-Up Bird..." is the first chapter from his spectacular novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles." All the characters in these stories are vaguely cynical, listless inhabitants of postmodern Tokyo - the city, as well as its people, are cosmopolitan and hyper-westernized, and many of the stories deal with discomforting lack of certainty and stability of the existence in such a world. People disappear, monsters plead for love, and real people act/talk as though they were characters in jaded fables. You might think Murakami's doing a version of magic realism, but he's more sly than that: no matter how fabulous events seem to be, the characters, the exacting details of the events, the dead-on metaphors/themes ground all the stories firmly to reality. The stories are a blast to read as well. When a hungry couple pulls a heist of a McDonald's and steal 20 big-macs, they politely pay for their two drinks and walk out. ("Bakery Attack") Trust me. You have to read it.
Rating:
Summary: The Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary
Review: Americans seem to be fascinated by the culture of Japan. We wonder endlessly about a group of islands that can produce things as diverse as Noh drama, zen gardens and Nintendo games. American writers, too, can't seem to get enough of Japan, e.g., Jay McInerney, John Burnham Schwartz and Michael Crichton.Haruki Murakami, one of the most original and brilliant authors writing today, gives us an entirely different look at life in Japan in his collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes. These stories show us Japan "from the inside." What might seem exotic to both Americans and Europeans, such as oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks, becomes, in these stories, the stuff of everyday life. In fact, Haruki Marakami's Japan could be "anyplace," and one has to read eleven pages into this collection before the first reference to Japan is ever made. In The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami's narrators are as much "Everyman" as are the narrators of his novels. They are young, urban and charmingly downwardly mobile. And, they are more likely to eat a plate of spaghetti than soba noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock but eschew Japanese rock music. They read Len Deighton and War and Peace rather than Kobo Abe and The Tale of the Genji. They are Japanese, to be sure, but all their points of reference seem to be exclusively Western and signature Murakami. In the world of Haruki Murakami, bizarre events take place with striking regularity and, also with strikingly regularity, they are accepted as simply the stuff of everyday life. In The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women, the narrator's search for a missing cat leads him to a closed-off and neglected alleyway passing between the backyards of parallel houses. Here, he encounters a sunbathing teenage girl who mimics the alleyway in that she is both ordinary and alien. In A Window, a correspondence school writing teacher pays a visit to a pupil, a married woman in her early thirties. They spend their time eating hamburgers and listening to Burt Bacharach. Nothing much happens; in fact, the thing the narrator remembers most is the lovely weather and the colorful array of sheets and futons drying over the railings of the building's verandahs. Like many of Murakami's protagonists, what these two share is absent more than it is present. Many of these stories seem more than a little fabulistic. The Dancing Dwarf is a good example. This story takes place in an impressively efficient factory that manufactures, of all things, elephants. The protagonist just happens to be assigned to the ear section during his narration of the story, working in that part of the building with the yellow ceiling and the yellow posts. His helmet and pants also happen to be yellow. The month before, however, he had been assigned to the green building and he had worn a green helmet and green pants and had made heads. TV People is a bizarre story that involves human mutants reduced by twenty to thirty percent, something that made them look far away even when close up. When these mutants invade both the narrator's home and office and begin to deny his very existence, he begins to doubt it as well. And, in The Elephant Vanishes, the haunting title story, an elephant actually disappears, with its keeper, from an enclosure where it has been kept as a mascot for a Tokyo suburb. The solution to the mystery, like all of Murakami's mysteries is not clear cut but hinges on a matter of perspective and proportion instead. Parallel worlds abound in these stories; this is ordinary life, but ordinary life fraught with unexpected and unsettling views. In the stories that make up The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami is doing what he does so wonderfully: pointing out how much of life is hidden beneath the surface, how much is truly unknowable. In Sleep, a young woman suddenly finds she no longer needs it. Rather than question her sudden awakening, she focuses instead on the strangeness of her husband's face. Unable to describe exactly why it now seems so strange to her, she simply accepts that it is weird and that is that. The protagonist of The Second Bakery Attack is similar in that he really doesn't question why his wife keeps a shotgun and ski masks in their car, even though neither of them had ever skied. Lest anyone think these stories gloss over life, they couldn't be more wrong. Detail abounds: the pull tabs from beer cans lying in overflowing ashtrays, shotgun shells that rustle like the buckwheat husks in old-fashioned pillows, ice melting in cocktail glasses. Like kittens lolling all over one another, a metaphor from a story entitled The Last Lawn of the Afternoon, these are stories in which animals--elephants, kangaroos, windup birds, and even the tragically mistreated "little green monsters"--play an extraordinarily prominent part. The Elephant Vanishes is definitely the world of Haruki Murakami, ordinary and yet so very, very extraordinary.
Rating:
Summary: After these odd stories, who can think of a review title?
Review: Among Haruki Murakami's other traits, he can write stories that bring us into surreal worlds of body and mind. Here, in a volume under the title The Elephant Vanishes, we find collected a selection of just such strangeness. Not every story is equally strange, but readers familiar with his novels The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Dance Dance Dance will be on familiar ground with most of these stories. For the not so strange, we still find our way into the Murakami-ness that marks the author's style. The best way to describe it is as viewing people who do not see themselves as well connected to the world around them. Thus we find some stories about as mundane as a college boy mowing lawns during the summer and musing about it, or a woman traveling in Germany buying lederhosen for her husband. But once again I find it impossible to describe to the uninitiated what the style really is. For me, though, the strange tales are the most satisfying, perhaps because they are describable. On the other hand, why should I describe them in detail when the book is available to the interested reader? It sort of makes for a lame review, but Murakami has to be experienced firsthand. Anything less is a disservice to oneself.
Rating:
Summary: THE SUBTERRAIN OF PROSE
Review: An untouchable mystery of thought, madness, and equally unexplained sadness -- such is the gloomy psychological landscape in which Murakami typically sets his intriguing narratives. All those deliciously subcutaneous elements of prose are as evident in this collection of over a dozen stories as in any of his longer novels. Geographically, many of them are based in Tokyo, but it might be any of the world's vast unforgiving cities where people get lost like tears in the rain and finding love is sometimes as hard as solving Rubik's cube in the dark. Reading Murakami is an unsettling, disorienting experience that can leave you feeling rather empty, but always somehow thoughtful. Minor gripe: my favorite translator of Murakami's work is Jay Rubin and I am certain that under his watchful pen the stories would have more closely resembled the verve of their originals (in Japanese). Nonetheless, if you have never read Murakami before, this marvellous collection is a great way to start in manageable dollops of his style. And if you are familiar with the author's dour tracts, this book should be an unmissable little something to relish on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant work from the humble literary giant.
Review: At the risk of sounding cliché, I have to say that Murakami never ceases to amaze me. The Elephant Vanishes is actually a book made up of 17 distinct stories, several of which have previously been published in publications as varied as “The New Yorker” and Playboy.” A reader would be hard-pressed to determine what the common thread is throughout the stories in this book other than Murakami’s own exploration of the mundane and dark corners of his soul. Many of the stories in The Elephant Vanishes are mere snapshots of the protagonists’ lives. Others are amazing realities created by Murakami’s amazing imagination. Whether commonplace or extraordinary, Murakami tells each story in a beautiful and convincing manner. While the characters in his stories never accomplish anything uncommon in their own worlds, readers are taken to places they’ve never even thought about going through Murakami’s remarkable story-telling abilities. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: snippets of Haruki Murakami surreal magic, .. and some duds
Review: Collections of short stories are often hit-and-miss affairs, and Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes is no exception. It contains both very memorable and rather forgettable stories. All of them have the Haruki Murakami surreal touch; modern Tokyo on drugs (if you will). Unfortunately the lead character in all his stories seem oddly the same, probably a thinly disguised version of Murakami himself. Bottom line: no, not as good as his brilliant The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. But certainly decent. Murakami fans will rejoice.
Rating:
Summary: snippets of Haruki Murakami surreal magic, .. and some duds
Review: Collections of short stories are often hit-and-miss affairs, and Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes is no exception. It contains both very memorable and rather forgettable stories. All of them have the Haruki Murakami surreal touch; modern Tokyo on drugs (if you will). Unfortunately the lead character in all his stories seem oddly the same, probably a thinly disguised version of Murakami himself. Bottom line: no, not as good as his brilliant The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. But certainly decent. Murakami fans will rejoice.
Rating: 
Summary: The Disconnected Ordinary Everyman
Review: Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes" does not reveal its coherence until the title story finishes the 327th page. This is a discussion about the shifting perspectives of man and woman in traditional society. Once the man loomed larger than women, but, like the elephant and his trainer, this notion has vanished from view. Murakami pauses to acknowledge and ponder. Many of the male characters in this collections of 17 short stories are stay-at-home husbands married to career-oriented wives. Whether house-sitting, working around the house, or tempted by younger women, these men deal with their sexual urges and emotions without help from traditional norms. Other characters explore their awakening sexual urges, sometimes destructively, other times formatively. The female characters are strong, confident, and often unsupportive and seductively teasing. This collection is also a more than a less book. The narrative voice is verbose and unchecked. This is a selfish narration, typically masculine, oblivious of utility or artfulness. But it is also honest. The stories are full of tidbits of erudition, excessive detail, and, sometimes, usefulness. It is more tape recorded psychology project than vision. However, culturally, the collection is sterile. it is not informative about Japanese norms and developments. Murakami's characters are typically middle-class, urban, cosmopolitan, and ordinary. This is not a sourcebook, to learn about Japanese attitudes, but a document chronicling the leveling effects of globalization. In many ways, it is as disturbing in its sterility as it is in its conclusions.
Rating:
Summary: Quirky, Fascinating, Japanese and Western too
Review: I bought this book on the strength of a review in one of the UK's Sunday papers.The review was flattering; the book itself offers more than the review mentioned. It is both distinctively Japanese and very Western (at times very much so - Japanese friends I have feel the same). All the stories are delightful - so much so that within a few weeks I had to reread the book. It is the kind of book that you can dip into and out of during moments of peace - it was my bedtime reading for about a week. Murakami is a man of huge talent. His other works are also extremely good. Highly recommended!
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