The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

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“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” Summary

Content Warning: This short story contains suggestions of pedophilia.

The first story of the collection, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” begins with the narrator cooking pasta at home when the phone rings. The phone call is from an unknown woman who asks for 10 minutes of the narrator’s time. When she learns the narrator is cooking, she says she will call back later. After eating, the man spends the day doing chores, listening for the distinct sound of the bird he and his wife refer to as the “wind-up bird.” The man quit his job as a legal secretary recently, having become disillusioned and bored. He is unsure what he wants in life. The man’s wife calls him to ask that he look for her missing cat.

A little later, the unknown woman calls again. The man agrees to hear her out, but when she takes the conversation in an erotic direction, he hangs up on her. He goes out to search for the cat in a neighbor’s overgrown garden, where he meets a teenage girl. The girl claims that all the neighborhood cats use her family’s yard as a shortcut, and she invites the man to wait with her. The two sit in the yard, and the girl tells the man of how she has been injured in an accident and is now not going to school. She leans in and speaks soothingly to him, and he falls asleep. When he wakes up, the girl is gone and the cat nowhere to be found. He goes home.

That evening, the man’s wife comes home. He cooks dinner and reveals that he did not find the cat. The woman is bothered by his attitude and weeps, accusing him of killing the cat through his indifference. The man listens to her in silence and drinks a beer.

“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” Analysis

The first story of the collection was previously published in English in a 1986 issue of The New Yorker. Murakami later turned the story into the first chapter of his 1995 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The story is thematically connected to the other stories of the collection, exploring the nature of Existential Anxiety in the Modern World, Perception Versus Reality, and Internality and Social Relationships. The narrator, like many of Murakami’s narrators, is at a crossroads: He is 30 years old, unemployed, and unsure what he wants from life. He believes that “somewhere, in [his] head, in [his] body, in [his] very existence, it’s as if there were some long-lost subterranean element that’s been skewing [his] life ever so slightly off […] Irretrievably” (14), confusing his perception of his own reality. The narrator does not even know why he left his previous job, where he was well paid and appreciated by his employers, nor does he know what he wants to do (at one point, his wife even suggests that he remain unemployed as a stay-at-home husband).

Murakami employs an eerie and unsettling tone for the story that underscores the narrator’s existential dread but also demonstrates an implicitly misogynistic lens on the female characters that the story fails to interrogate. The phone call from the unknown woman—which opens the story—is jarring for the narrator as well as the reader. The woman does not even seem to care that the narrator does not know who she is or that she may have called him in error. The similarities between the mysterious caller and the young girl the narrator meets later in the story become increasingly disturbing as the girl convinces the man to sit with her in her yard to wait for his cat. She speaks to him in a soft voice, sitting close to him and even touching him on his lips and wrist. The story’s tone suggests something erotic in the interaction between the narrator and the underaged girl, positioning her (similar to the mysterious female caller) as the sexual aggressor and the narrator as the passive recipient of her advances, without addressing the inherent imbalance of power in their dynamic with him as an adult and her as a child.

Throughout the story, surreal elements are balanced against scenes that are deceptively normal and mundane—the man cooking, looking for his wife’s lost cat, or ironing his shirts (though the narrator himself points out that he has a tendency to iron precisely when he feels unsettled). Something as routine as answering the phone is offset by a call from a mysterious woman who expresses a sexual interest in the narrator. In contrast to the narrator’s existential dread and unease, the teenage girl and the narrator’s wife appear more as archetypes rather than nuanced characters with their own interiority. The teenage girl and the narrator’s wife exist to complicate his own internality with the lack of their own internality.