An Elephant Vanishes

29/07/2025

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If many who believe in the supernatural can appear naive; those who have complete faith in the rational world can seem limited. Insisting that everything is mysteriously contained by a higher being is the flip side of claiming that everything is comprehensible by a lower one, by the laws of science that define our universe. This isn’t to say that believers have as much right to their higher beliefs as those who can explain the workings of gravity, the properties of an atom, or the nutritional value of a loaf of bread. It is more that aspects of the inexplicable have their place and needn’t be dismissed because they are not scientific. They remain in a state of suspension, neither falling into the fantastic nor siding with the rational.

    It is this balance Haruki Murakami seeks in 'The Elephant Vanishes', a story that presents itself as a mystery the reader might wish to be solved, but at a certain point realises that the irresolution happens to be the point. An elephant goes missing, yet nobody in the town can understand how, and the initial newspaper report is inevitably muddled. “Riddled as it was with such perplexities and laboured circumlocutions, the newspaper article as a whole left but one conclusion. The Elephant had not escaped. It had vanished.” The escape seemed logically and empirically impossible. The elephant had escaped the steel cuff attached to its leg and disappeared along with its keeper. But the keeper didn’t have a set of keys and the two sets remained where they were: one set was in a safe in the police station; the other in the firehouse. Anyone who had somehow managed to steal one of them wouldn’t be likely to have then placed the keys back there. If someone had committed a crime based on nobody knowing a crime had been committed, they might return the keys. But since the missing elephant was conspicuous, there would be no reason to return them. 

       If the elephant couldn’t have escaped, it was firstly because the keeper had no key to release it, and secondly, because the elephant house was so difficult to exit. With a system “that might be considered excessive for keeping one old elephant. Heavy iron bars had been anchored on a thick concrete foundation…and there was only a single entrance, which was found locked from the inside. There was no way the elephant could have escaped from this fortress-like enclosure.” Then there is the problem of the elephant’s tracks — there weren’t any, and thus no sign of escape. 

      At one moment, Murakami invokes Sherlock Holmes and we shouldn’t forget that for all Holmes’ brilliant rationality in solving a crime, Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t impervious to the supernatural, holding numerous seances and believing the living could speak to the dead. Murakami’s work has the initial mystery of Holmes and sympathy towards the inexplicable, but it seems less for supporting the other-worldly than in seeing that the self contains other worlds. This might be the difference between a Conan-Doyle-like belief in the irrational, and Murakami’s interest in the incomprehensible as a problem of self, perception and the unconscious. As Murakami says, speaking of a scene with fish raining down in Kafka on the Shore: “if that’s what comes to me, maybe there’s something right about that – something from the deep subconscious [that resonates with] the reader. So now the reader and I have a secret meeting place underground, a secret place in the subconscious. And in that place, maybe it’s absolutely right that fish should fall from the sky. It’s the meeting place that matters, not analysing the symbolism or anything like that. I’ll leave that to the intellectuals.” (Guardian) 

      In 'The Elephant Vanishes', the reader forgoes the mystery at the point when Sherlock Holmes would be moving towards resolving it, with one accepting a complicit relationship with the narrator that Holmes doesn’t require partly due to the rational conclusion he arrives upon. Readers agree that he has solved the crime; in 'The Elephant Vanishes' we must accept that the mystery of the elephant remains exactly that. Conan Doyle insists in the Holmes stories that everybody can agree that he hasn't arrived at complicity but rationality: the evidentially conclusive as Holmes explains in detail how the crime has been committed. In 'The Elephant Vanishes', the narrator tries to explain to a woman he meets, someone with whom he seems to be moving towards intimacy, what he saw the evening the elephant disappeared. “She was unmarried and so was I. She was twenty-six and I was thirty-one. She wore contact lenses and I wore glasses. She praised my necktie and I praised her jacket. We complained about our jobs and salaries. In other words, we were beginning to like each other.” They then start talking about the elephant, and as he speaks about it she finds what he says strange. She says instead of him saying that it was weird and leaving it at that he seems to want to probe the problem, saying “for an elephant to disappear all of a sudden one day — there’s no precedent, no need, for such a thing to happen. It doesn’t make any logical sense.” 

      He then tells her he may have been the last person to see the elephant before it disappeared and explains that he was out one day and saw from the top of the cliff the roof of the elephant house and a vent he could peer into. He would often visit the place and look at the elephant from this vantage point, and was there the night it disappeared. She wants to know what he saw, and he tells her that it was as though the balance between the elephant and the keeper had changed: “I had the feeling that to some extent the difference between them had shrunk.” She asks why he didn’t tell this to the police and he said obviously he couldn't; the evidence he had was without rational base: a product of his perception he didn’t doubt, but how could that meet with the demands of the police investigation?

    Musing over why he ended up talking about the elephant to this woman, he thinks: “Maybe, unconsciously I had been looking for someone — a good listener — to whom I could present my own, unique view on the elephant’s disappearance.” It is a variation of what Murakami says when he speaks about the secret place in the subconscious; an attempt at a meeting of minds. Minds, in this sense, usually don’t need to meet, they need to agree, and the best way to do so is by agreeing on the evidence produced. The narrator has an explanation he offers the woman, but she can only accept it or reject it, or offer what she sees as a similar story. She tells him that when she was a girl, the family cat disappeared. But he says there is no comparison between a cat going missing and an elephant, and they part shortly afterwards. He talks to her once over the phone about a work issue, and though he muses over inviting her out for dinner, he chooses not to: “It just didn’t seem to matter one way or another.” 

    Some reading the story might be disappointed that it remains inconclusive; others may insist that the absence of an explanation invites symbolic interpretation. One could think of the elephant in the room (the Japanese have an equivalent saying) and see that the story is about something that gets ignored, but the point here is that he doesn’t ignore the elephant and tries to talk about it. Maybe people will see in the elephant the wise: “Because it was so widely practiced, Buddhist-derived symbology of the elephant, such as a representation of wisdom, was widely known and deployed. Moreover, in Japan, Fugen (Samantabhadra), the Bodhisattva of Great Conduct, was an important deity. He is usually depicted on an elephant, the remover of obstacles."('Elephants Under the Rising Sun: Pachyderms in Pre-Modern Japan') However, the elephant doesn’t seem wise; its disappearance simply shows up the limitations of conventional knowledge. To insist on reading the story symbolically we risk losing the troublesomeness the story invokes, the type of agreement Murakami might be seeking and why the meeting with the woman and the attempt to explain what he saw happens to be so important. It isn’t what he says that is of such import, but that he attempts to say it at all. 

   The narrator knows he cannot go the police; it is the sort of provisional and absurd claim the authorities wouldn’t know what to do with But a sympathetic person might. It is the sort of knowledge that reveals vulnerability and we understand why the narrator would be reluctant to share it, except with someone who has an interest in him, in his mind. It is the kind of information that doesn’t allow for certitude but does potentially create complicity. It could become a secret between them, however inexplicable, yet instead it is as though it returns him to his solitude, a solitariness we may feel the story has revealed in the way he explains his interest in the elephant before it disappears. He describes it as one might an act of voyeurism: “If anyone had asked me why I bothered doing such a thing, I wouldn’t have had a decent answer. I simply enjoyed watching the elephant during its private time.” To tell someone they would spy on an elephant that then promptly shrinks, and manages to lose its shackles because of its diminishing size, is quite a revelation. It is oddly intimate, as if Murakami wondered how to create an uncanny secret that could generate an affinity or even greater alienation. When the narrator tells us he and the woman shared the sort of chat people who like each other share, with mutual compliments and employment grievances, it suggests they are getting closer. But often the next stage towards that closeness is revealing an aspect of oneself that is hidden to others, and the narrator offers a vulnerability so great it isn’t just psychologically exposing but epistemologically cataclysmic. It is the very thing the story about the missing cat isn’t. 

    We can then view the story as about two couples: one that possesses this complicity; the other that doesn’t and thus can’t become close. When the narrator watches the elephant he is also watching the close relationship between the elephant and the keeper, saying, “what struck me immediately when I saw the elephant and the keeper alone together was the obvious liking they had for each other — something they never displayed when they were out before the public.” They had the public and the private relationship, perhaps the narrator seeks when offering the elephant story as a way of finding out if the young woman is willing to ‘understand’ him. Anybody capable of absorbing such a level of apparently unfathomable information would probably be a keeper, so to speak. She seems unable to do so and the narrator is back to being alone. 

  Near the end of the story, the narrator tells us that he continues selling refrigerators and toaster ovens in the pragmatic world. “The more pragmatic I try to become, the more successfully I sell…That’s probably because people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of colour. Unity of function.” This is the functional world, yet he also has the “afterimages of memories I retain from that world”, the world where a keeper and an elephant can have a closer relationship than the humans he knows, and, if not dissolve into each other, disappear together. 

   Murakami reckons, “We have a sane part of our minds, and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I'm writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal.” (Paris Review) Yet in a story like 'The Elephant Vanishes' it is as if the narrator seeks in his successful, material existence to find a way of living, and potentially loving, in a world that acknowledges an alternative universe within our own. He finds it in the vanishing elephant, but not, it seems, in a relationship he may still be seeking. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

An Elephant Vanishes

If many who believe in the supernatural can appear naive; those who have complete faith in the rational world can seem limited. Insisting that everything is mysteriously contained by a higher being is the flip side of claiming that everything is comprehensible by a lower one, by the laws of science that define our universe. This isn’t to say that believers have as much right to their higher beliefs as those who can explain the workings of gravity, the properties of an atom, or the nutritional value of a loaf of bread. It is more that aspects of the inexplicable have their place and needn’t be dismissed because they are not scientific. They remain in a state of suspension, neither falling into the fantastic nor siding with the rational.

    It is this balance Haruki Murakami seeks in 'The Elephant Vanishes', a story that presents itself as a mystery the reader might wish to be solved, but at a certain point realises that the irresolution happens to be the point. An elephant goes missing, yet nobody in the town can understand how, and the initial newspaper report is inevitably muddled. “Riddled as it was with such perplexities and laboured circumlocutions, the newspaper article as a whole left but one conclusion. The Elephant had not escaped. It had vanished.” The escape seemed logically and empirically impossible. The elephant had escaped the steel cuff attached to its leg and disappeared along with its keeper. But the keeper didn’t have a set of keys and the two sets remained where they were: one set was in a safe in the police station; the other in the firehouse. Anyone who had somehow managed to steal one of them wouldn’t be likely to have then placed the keys back there. If someone had committed a crime based on nobody knowing a crime had been committed, they might return the keys. But since the missing elephant was conspicuous, there would be no reason to return them. 

       If the elephant couldn’t have escaped, it was firstly because the keeper had no key to release it, and secondly, because the elephant house was so difficult to exit. With a system “that might be considered excessive for keeping one old elephant. Heavy iron bars had been anchored on a thick concrete foundation…and there was only a single entrance, which was found locked from the inside. There was no way the elephant could have escaped from this fortress-like enclosure.” Then there is the problem of the elephant’s tracks — there weren’t any, and thus no sign of escape. 

      At one moment, Murakami invokes Sherlock Holmes and we shouldn’t forget that for all Holmes’ brilliant rationality in solving a crime, Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t impervious to the supernatural, holding numerous seances and believing the living could speak to the dead. Murakami’s work has the initial mystery of Holmes and sympathy towards the inexplicable, but it seems less for supporting the other-worldly than in seeing that the self contains other worlds. This might be the difference between a Conan-Doyle-like belief in the irrational, and Murakami’s interest in the incomprehensible as a problem of self, perception and the unconscious. As Murakami says, speaking of a scene with fish raining down in Kafka on the Shore: “if that’s what comes to me, maybe there’s something right about that – something from the deep subconscious [that resonates with] the reader. So now the reader and I have a secret meeting place underground, a secret place in the subconscious. And in that place, maybe it’s absolutely right that fish should fall from the sky. It’s the meeting place that matters, not analysing the symbolism or anything like that. I’ll leave that to the intellectuals.” (Guardian) 

      In 'The Elephant Vanishes', the reader forgoes the mystery at the point when Sherlock Holmes would be moving towards resolving it, with one accepting a complicit relationship with the narrator that Holmes doesn’t require partly due to the rational conclusion he arrives upon. Readers agree that he has solved the crime; in 'The Elephant Vanishes' we must accept that the mystery of the elephant remains exactly that. Conan Doyle insists in the Holmes stories that everybody can agree that he hasn't arrived at complicity but rationality: the evidentially conclusive as Holmes explains in detail how the crime has been committed. In 'The Elephant Vanishes', the narrator tries to explain to a woman he meets, someone with whom he seems to be moving towards intimacy, what he saw the evening the elephant disappeared. “She was unmarried and so was I. She was twenty-six and I was thirty-one. She wore contact lenses and I wore glasses. She praised my necktie and I praised her jacket. We complained about our jobs and salaries. In other words, we were beginning to like each other.” They then start talking about the elephant, and as he speaks about it she finds what he says strange. She says instead of him saying that it was weird and leaving it at that he seems to want to probe the problem, saying “for an elephant to disappear all of a sudden one day — there’s no precedent, no need, for such a thing to happen. It doesn’t make any logical sense.” 

      He then tells her he may have been the last person to see the elephant before it disappeared and explains that he was out one day and saw from the top of the cliff the roof of the elephant house and a vent he could peer into. He would often visit the place and look at the elephant from this vantage point, and was there the night it disappeared. She wants to know what he saw, and he tells her that it was as though the balance between the elephant and the keeper had changed: “I had the feeling that to some extent the difference between them had shrunk.” She asks why he didn’t tell this to the police and he said obviously he couldn't; the evidence he had was without rational base: a product of his perception he didn’t doubt, but how could that meet with the demands of the police investigation?

    Musing over why he ended up talking about the elephant to this woman, he thinks: “Maybe, unconsciously I had been looking for someone — a good listener — to whom I could present my own, unique view on the elephant’s disappearance.” It is a variation of what Murakami says when he speaks about the secret place in the subconscious; an attempt at a meeting of minds. Minds, in this sense, usually don’t need to meet, they need to agree, and the best way to do so is by agreeing on the evidence produced. The narrator has an explanation he offers the woman, but she can only accept it or reject it, or offer what she sees as a similar story. She tells him that when she was a girl, the family cat disappeared. But he says there is no comparison between a cat going missing and an elephant, and they part shortly afterwards. He talks to her once over the phone about a work issue, and though he muses over inviting her out for dinner, he chooses not to: “It just didn’t seem to matter one way or another.” 

    Some reading the story might be disappointed that it remains inconclusive; others may insist that the absence of an explanation invites symbolic interpretation. One could think of the elephant in the room (the Japanese have an equivalent saying) and see that the story is about something that gets ignored, but the point here is that he doesn’t ignore the elephant and tries to talk about it. Maybe people will see in the elephant the wise: “Because it was so widely practiced, Buddhist-derived symbology of the elephant, such as a representation of wisdom, was widely known and deployed. Moreover, in Japan, Fugen (Samantabhadra), the Bodhisattva of Great Conduct, was an important deity. He is usually depicted on an elephant, the remover of obstacles."('Elephants Under the Rising Sun: Pachyderms in Pre-Modern Japan') However, the elephant doesn’t seem wise; its disappearance simply shows up the limitations of conventional knowledge. To insist on reading the story symbolically we risk losing the troublesomeness the story invokes, the type of agreement Murakami might be seeking and why the meeting with the woman and the attempt to explain what he saw happens to be so important. It isn’t what he says that is of such import, but that he attempts to say it at all. 

   The narrator knows he cannot go the police; it is the sort of provisional and absurd claim the authorities wouldn’t know what to do with But a sympathetic person might. It is the sort of knowledge that reveals vulnerability and we understand why the narrator would be reluctant to share it, except with someone who has an interest in him, in his mind. It is the kind of information that doesn’t allow for certitude but does potentially create complicity. It could become a secret between them, however inexplicable, yet instead it is as though it returns him to his solitude, a solitariness we may feel the story has revealed in the way he explains his interest in the elephant before it disappears. He describes it as one might an act of voyeurism: “If anyone had asked me why I bothered doing such a thing, I wouldn’t have had a decent answer. I simply enjoyed watching the elephant during its private time.” To tell someone they would spy on an elephant that then promptly shrinks, and manages to lose its shackles because of its diminishing size, is quite a revelation. It is oddly intimate, as if Murakami wondered how to create an uncanny secret that could generate an affinity or even greater alienation. When the narrator tells us he and the woman shared the sort of chat people who like each other share, with mutual compliments and employment grievances, it suggests they are getting closer. But often the next stage towards that closeness is revealing an aspect of oneself that is hidden to others, and the narrator offers a vulnerability so great it isn’t just psychologically exposing but epistemologically cataclysmic. It is the very thing the story about the missing cat isn’t. 

    We can then view the story as about two couples: one that possesses this complicity; the other that doesn’t and thus can’t become close. When the narrator watches the elephant he is also watching the close relationship between the elephant and the keeper, saying, “what struck me immediately when I saw the elephant and the keeper alone together was the obvious liking they had for each other — something they never displayed when they were out before the public.” They had the public and the private relationship, perhaps the narrator seeks when offering the elephant story as a way of finding out if the young woman is willing to ‘understand’ him. Anybody capable of absorbing such a level of apparently unfathomable information would probably be a keeper, so to speak. She seems unable to do so and the narrator is back to being alone. 

  Near the end of the story, the narrator tells us that he continues selling refrigerators and toaster ovens in the pragmatic world. “The more pragmatic I try to become, the more successfully I sell…That’s probably because people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of colour. Unity of function.” This is the functional world, yet he also has the “afterimages of memories I retain from that world”, the world where a keeper and an elephant can have a closer relationship than the humans he knows, and, if not dissolve into each other, disappear together. 

   Murakami reckons, “We have a sane part of our minds, and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I'm writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal.” (Paris Review) Yet in a story like 'The Elephant Vanishes' it is as if the narrator seeks in his successful, material existence to find a way of living, and potentially loving, in a world that acknowledges an alternative universe within our own. He finds it in the vanishing elephant, but not, it seems, in a relationship he may still be seeking. 


© Tony McKibbin