The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Dense with symbolism, this story explores themes of Internality and Social Relationships as well as the nature of reality. The narrator’s confession that she often speaks to the tree evokes a sense of loneliness and solitude, but when she gets the opportunity to connect with another living thing—the little green monster—she kills him. The color green is often used in literature to represent jealousy, but it can also represent nature and new life (further signaled by the little green monster emerging from below the oak tree).

Murakami describes the monster as having eyes “exactly like a human’s” (153), which alarms the narrator, but she’s most disturbed by the monster’s ability to read her thoughts, violating her internality. The narrator reacts with fear and revulsion to the monster’s invasion of both her physical and mental space, even though the monster claims that he has come only to profess his love for the woman. The woman responds to this violation by weaponizing the monster’s power against him—torturing him with her own thoughts that he insists on reading in her mind—until he withers away and vanishes into thin air. Some interpret Murakami’s story as a metaphor for repressed sexual assault, with the monster standing for the memory of the event. The fact that the monster loves the woman does not change the fact that he has intruded upon her, burrowing through her garden and breaking into her home—whatever the monster’s feelings, his behavior “is rude and presumptuous” (155). But the narrator is able to overcome the monster with her will and the power of her mind, until only a “pale evening shadow” (156) remains in its place.