The modern society faces a real problem of alienation; in the attempts to earn much money, to make a distinguished career and to lead a successful way of living, people forget about panhuman values, which were so important for the past generations, become unsociable. The phenomenon of a single person has arisen, when a young men or a women prefer to focus their inner world on the career and forget about the necessity to communicate with other people; they work at home as “freelancers” or give their work so much of their time, that cannot find a moment for intercourses with their relatives and friends.
Motif of loneliness, isolation from the society, and, in some measure, emptiness within a person penetrates all works of Haruki Murakami. His characters, being ordinary people and facing modern, pragmatic world and its realities, try to find inside themselves and in people surrounding them those things, which can lead them to inner balance and harmony, and at the same time they usually feel themselves aliens, singletons, they are disconnected and alone. Often they cannot find strength within themselves to oppose their loneliness. In an attempt to elude the reality, they often invent unreal worlds or find solace in someone else’s problems: “their ontological relationship with reality appears to be defined by their ability to create unreality” (Wang, Qun).
The two stories, The Elephant Vanishes and The Second Bakery Attack, from the book “Elephant Vanishes”, reveal Murakami’s attempt to show how a person can come up with a solution of his inner problems, how he deals loneliness and isolation from the society, how he faces the reality of the modern world.In The Second Bakery attack Murakami depicts a relationship of past and present, reality and imagination, loneliness and confidence between people. The story is about a man, who has just married, but who has his own dark past, which is really on his back. Murakami tracks two metaphorical lines in this story.
He “so thoroughly embeds these metaphorical stories into character’s thoughts and actions that it’s impossible to tell which are real and which are not” (Esposito). The first metaphorical line is hunger, which keeps on the run the narrator and his wife. They awake at night and cannot fall asleep because of this feeling. It is so strong that the narrator tells about it: “this hunger of ours as vast and boundless as the Sinai Peninsula” (Murakami).
They go to the kitchen in order to find some food, but there they find only beer and dry cookies – the other things are simply inedible. The sense of hunger comes to the narrator not for the first time. Having drunk his beer, he casually tells his wife a story of his first bakery attack: being young students, the narrator and his friend tried to attack a bakery, not for money but for bread: they were rather poor, they did not wish to work, and they wanted to appease their hunger. The narrator calls this first attack a curse, which has changed his life; the wife admits that this curse works on her too and decides to help him to dispose of it.
She offers him to attack the bakery once again. This proposal does not seem to surprise the narrator very much; neither has he wandered about wife’s Remington and ski masks: “why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied.
But she didn’t explain and I didn’t ask. Married life is weird, I felt” (Murakami). Having attacked McDonald’s and eaten 10 hamburgers, their hunger passes away.The second metaphorical line of the story is a vision of an underwater volcano and acrophobia, connected with this invention of the narrator’s mind.
Suffering from hunger, he simultaneously owes a fear of the volcano, which he has fabulated himself, and which, in his imagination, he allegedly passes by in a boat:“One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water’s surface, but just how close I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance” (Murakami).
His imagination draws this picture each time the narrator doubts his domesticity or his wife disagrees with some of his suggestions: she refuses to go to an all-night restaurant, and then she tries to connect the hunger with their marriage: “I’ve never been this hungry in my whole life,’ she said. ‘I wonder if it has anything to do with being married” (Murakami). These facts really upset him insomuch as that subconsciously he begins to fear the wife’s unhappiness and misunderstanding. “In all instances the, men when they are at all aware of their marital relationships, seem bewildered by their wives’ dissatisfaction and unhappiness” (Hakutani, 19).
The narrator calls his visions of underwater volcano a revelation, though he does not understand why it comes to him and why he is so afraid of it. And only by the end of the story, when his wife lays her head on his shoulder, this fear passes off, as well as hunger. These two feelings are connected for the narrator, though he cannot properly understand why; yet, both of them are the metaphors of loneliness and emptiness:“Something about this weird sense of absence – this sense of the existential reality of non-existence – resembled the paralyzing fear you might feel when you climb to the very top of a high steeple. This connection between hunger and acrophobia was a new discovery for me” (Murakami).
Hunger and acrophobia are, primarily, the feelings of inner emptiness, imbalance, labyrinth of confidence in his wife, and the resulting loneliness for the narrator. The narrator considers that the first attack was caused by hunger, yet he admits that after that he turned his back on his friend: “Something happened, some nothing kind of thing, and we stopped hanging around together. I haven’t seen him since” (Murakami). He has gone far in his life: graduated the university, found a job, married, but the sense of wholeness has not come to him.
The first attack was a protest against this pragmatic and ruthless world for him and his friend, but after that an inner abruption came. The subconscious conception that nothing has changed since this “mistake”, as he calls the attack, and the world remains pragmatic and ignorant comes to the narrator. He tries to understand the reason of his disconnection, but fails. He marries, but cannot see a closer with his wife; he is afraid that she does not understand him.
The fear of loneliness and misunderstanding are expressed in his vision of underwater volcano. Yet, his wife wants to share his problems:“You can tell, if you think about it. And unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, it’ll stick with you like a toothache. It’ll torture you till you die.
And not just you. Me, too. […] I’m your best friend now, aren’t I? Why do you think we’re both so hungry? I never, ever, once in my life felt a hunger like this until I married you. Don’t you think it’s abnormal? Your curse is working on me, too” (Murakami).
And when she proposes to attack the bakery once again, she understands what he really feels. Murakami does not say it straight, but the sense of her understanding, empathy, and involvement into her husband’s life is implied. She decides to prove him that he is not lonely and he can repose his trust on her. The narrator secures assistance from a person he’d never guess he can depend on, he could not even imagine such thing: he used to be withdrawn and not to share his problems with anyone.
Yet, she is the leader in the attack, and she is a salvation for the narrator from his loneliness. “The man and woman are hungry in ways other than the physical but are unable to identify it, and the wife grabs on to the bakery attack idea as their path back to comfort, to normalcy, to each other” (Tiffany). After the attack, the narrator understands that there is a person he can rely on, his inner balance is redressed; in the end of the story he realizes that all the fears have gone and hunger passed away:“I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano was gone.
The water’s calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves–like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze–lapped against the side of the boat. There was nothing else. I stretched out in the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged” (Murakami).
The plot of The Elephant vanishes is focused on a strange disappearance of an old elephant and its keeper. Yet, the story is about loneliness and isolation from the outer world; all characters are singletons: the narrator, his acquaintance editor of the housewives’ magazine, the elephant and its keeper are single and lonely, but two of them manage to find a way to come up with a solution of this problem, and the others never do. The narrator of the story is a lonely young man, who “spends most of his time alone, engaging in solitary activities” (Rich), and whose main interest in life and the source of his own comfort is the existence of the elephant and its relations with its old keeper: “in witnessing their apparent happiness, the narrator found a degree of meaning for his own life.” (Rich).
The young man even has a scrapbook, dedicated to the animal; he has been gathering all articles about it since the old zoo was closed and the elephant, considered to be too old to be sent to another zoo, became the town’s property. The decision was adopted by the mayor, and though the opposite party disagreed with it (they preferred to invest money into something more realistic and pragmatic); the people supported their mayor: “people like old elephants better than sewers and fire engines” (Murakami). The elephant is another lonely creature in the story: “the animal was brought from a distant land to live out its last years in a cage, isolated from others of its kind” (Rich). And its keeper isolates himself from the outer world by choosing to dedicate his own life to the animal.
Being detached from the outer pragmatic world, those two find a comfort in the company of each other. They have no interest in the modern affairs and just happy to live their simple lives.The story itself begins with the description of an absurd article about the elephant’s disappearance from its house. The journalists are confused about the fact: the cuff that has been usually fastened to the elephant’s leg is closed, there are no elephant’s tracks, and the only entrance is closed from the inner side.
They lose themselves in conjectures, how it has managed to disappear. The narrator, in fact, is the only one, who knows that the elephant has not disappeared, escaped or been stolen, but vanished. He knows much about the animal, but he does not want to reveal this to the police or journalism. The young man is afraid of misunderstanding from the side of the society; he thinks that no one will ever believe him.
His knowledge of the elephant’s and its keeper’s disappearance can be easily explained: he goes to the elephant’s house every evening and observes the animal’s life and relations between the elephant and the keeper with a sincere envy: “the narrator notices that the elephant and his keeper have genuine feeling for each other” (Loughman). Their relations represent the narrator’s ideal of life that vanishes. His envy can be explained, as the narrator has never had a similar feeling for anyone. He describes the relations between the elephant and the keeper as if it was the relations between close friends:“They had been together for more than ten years, and you could sense their closeness in every gesture and look.
Whenever the elephant was standing there blankly and the keeper wanted it to move, all he had to do was stand next to the elephant, tap it on a front leg, and whisper something in its ear. Then, swaying in huge bulk, the elephant would go exactly where the keeper had indicated, take up in new position, and continue staring at a point in space” (Murakami).On the day of their disappearance, he notices a change in them; he calls it a change of a balance: “In size. Of their bodies.
The elephant’s and the keeper’s. The balance seemed to have changed somewhat. I had the feeling that to some extent the difference between them had shrunk” (Murakami). He suggests that either the elephant has shrunken, or the keeper has become bigger.
In metaphorical form, Murakami states that the keeper and the elephant have become so close to each other, so irrespective of the outer world, that, first, they assimilated to each other, reached a mutual harmony, and then they simply vanished from the world, where their relations can be seen as weird and unusual. The outer world, in fact, will forget them very soon:“The disappearance of one old elephant and one old elephant keeper would have no impact on the course of society. The earth would continue its monotonous rotations, politicians would continue issuing unreliable proclamations, people would continue yawning on their way to the office, children would continue studying for their college-entrance exams. Amid the endless surge and ebb of everyday life, interest in a missing elephant could not last forever” (Murakami).
The only person who will remember them for all his life is the narrator, though he does not change either, he “continues to sell refrigerators and toaster ovens” (Loughman). It is his job, though he dislikes it. He tells stories about unity in design to editors of housekeepers’ magazines, though he is not sure about the unity inside himself, he doubts if it is really necessary in his life: “A kitchen probably does need a few things more than it needs unity. But those other elements are things you can’t sell.
And in this pragmatic world of ours, things you can’t sell don’t count for much” (Murakami). He is the person who depends on the pragmatic world and who cannot share his feelings with anyone; he isolates himself, yet he admires the relations between the elephant and the keeper:“This long-term closeness and warmth contrasts dramatically with the isolation the narrator experiences in his everyday life as a company man and with the empty gestures offered by the narrator’s society at large, which fails to see the mystery at the heart of the vanishing much less to explain it. The pragmatic, consumerist contemporary world provides no room for the kind of intimate, intuitive bond shared by the elephant and the keeper, and Murakami seems to suggest that their vanishing is inevitable in the face of the new prosperity and materialistic values” (Hong).He still attends the elephant’s house, though he feels “the air of doom and desolation” (Murakami) hanging over it.
This sense of desolation burns into his mind, “he finds he cannot make decisions he would like to make does not see” (Hong). Being a company man and having reached a success, the narrator still wants to find a personal happiness. He is lonely, though he tries to find someone who can understand his inner world, yet, he is afraid of misunderstanding. At the company party he meets a woman, which he seems to like, he flirts with her until he begins to tell the story of the elephant’s disappearance.
New acquaintance understands that the story is a personal and closed question for the narrator: “You were carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with me until a couple of minutes ago — at least until the subject of the elephant came up. Then something funny happened. I can’t understand you anymore. Something’s wrong.
Is it the elephant? ” (Murakami). She does not wish to sidle up into his inner life; neither has he attempted to share it with her. He is afraid that she won’t understand him, so their first meeting turns out to be the last. The feeling of the world’s imperfection, the fear of misunderstanding leads him to a sad thought: “I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me.
Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to strike my eye in a strange way. It’s probably something in me” (Murakami). He finds himself paralyzed and cannot “take action of any kind on his own behalf” (Hong). Yet, Murakami does not seem to blame only the narrator for his uncertainty, he suggests that the pragmatic outer world changes the inner world of the person and it is difficult to find the inner balance singly.
In his story “the elephant and the keeper palpably demonstrate what has been lost in the transition to modern culture, as the two of them display an unusually strong bond of affection” (Hong). The vanishing in this story is not personal; it is about the disintegration of the modern society. The elephant is associated with the past times, the old values, which are lost in the modern world, or simply vanished. “The loss, in turn, signals an end to an era for the narrator” (Folster) and for the whole world.
In both stories Haruki Murakami depicts the persons, attempting to find a way out from the isolation and disconnection. “Lonely, fragmented, unable to communicate, they live a mechanical, purposeless existence. They vaguely sense, that they something is missing in their lives” (Hakutani, 19). The inner feeling of misbalance does not let them live happy and meaningful lives.
Both narrators try to find the explanation of their psychic anxiety in something, which is unreal and unusual for ordinary understanding; and that is their way to escape from their real problems. They do not want to understand and take hard their own disconnection. “Something traumatic rattles their complacency, triggering a quest in which they struggle to plumb the deep wells of personal and cultural memory for meaning” (Welch, 57). Yet, Murakami implies that not his characters are to blame for their unwillingness to solve their problems, but the modern society, where the alienation and isolation is rather a norm, than a surprise.
In the Second Bakery Attack, the narrator struggles from his solitude which reflects in hunger and acrophobia, he does not want to realize what really happens to him, until his wife helps him to find a way out. The story the Elephant Vanishes depicts a person whose world is focused on the happiness of the elephant and its keeper; and when they vanish, the balance inside the narrator vanishes too. Though Murakami suggests a way out, not all of his characters understand it properly and the question of the inner balance is still opened for some of them.Works CitedEsposito, Scott.
“Haruki Murakami’s Meaningful Metaphors”. http://esposito.typepad.com/TQC_5/Murakami_Metaphor.
htmlHakutani, Yoshinobu. Postmodernity and Cross-Culturalism. Fairleigh Dickinson Univrsity Press. 2002.
214 ppHong, Anna Maria. “Critical Essay on “The Elephant Vanishes”. Short Stories for Students, Vol. 23.
Thomson Gale. 2006.Loughman, Celeste. “A review of The Elephant Vanishes”.
World Literature Today, Vol. 68. 1994. pp.
434-35Murakami, Haruki. The Elephant Vanishes. http://www.geocities.
jp/yoshio_osakabe/Haruki/Books/The-Elephant-Vanishes.htmlMurakami, Haruki. The Second Bakery Attack. http://web.
mit.edu/norvin/www/somethingelse/murakami.htmlRich, Mark. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition.
Salem Press, Inc.2004.Stacey, Michele Olster. The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture, and the Making of the American Culture.
University of Georgia Press. 2003. 250 pp.Tiffany, Matthew.
A Short Guide to Murakami’s Short Fiction http://esposito.typepad.com/TQC_5/Murakami_Roundtable_Short_Fict.htmlWang, Qun.
“Magill Book Reviews: Elephant Vanishes, The”. Magill’s Literary Annual. Salem Press, Inc. 1994Welch, Patricia.
“Haruki Murakami’s storytelling world”. World literature today, January-April 2005. 2005.
