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    A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes"
    A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes"
    A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes"
    Ebook33 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535836388
    A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes"

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      A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes" - Gale

      1

      The Elephant Vanishes

      Haruki Murakami

      1991

      Introduction

      Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes was first published in English in the New Yorker in November 1991 and is found in his short story collection The Elephant Vanishes: Stories published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. Jay Rubin translated the story from Japanese into English. The short story was also included in the anthology The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Theodore Goossen. The Elephant Vanishes: Stories consists of seventeen short stories told in first-person point of view.

      Like other stories in this collection, The Elephant Vanishes focuses on a strange incident that leaves its protagonist disoriented. An unnamed narrator tells the story of how an aged elephant and its keeper mysteriously disappear one night from his town's elephant house. The narrator, who is the protagonist of the story, recalls the events leading up to the elephant's sudden vanishing, the news coverage of the incident, and the futile efforts of the townspeople to find the elephant and the keeper. He also discusses the strange circumstances of the elephant's disappearance, which indicate that the elephant apparently vanished into thin air. After meeting a magazine editor who is a potential love interest, the narrator ends up talking about how he witnessed the elephant shrinking or the keeper becoming bigger or both on the night of their disappearance, and the story concludes with the bewildered narrator lamenting the loss of the elephant and the keeper. Like other Murakami stories, this one is imbued with a sense of things being out of order in urban, contemporary society, which leaves its characters feeling alienated, disillusioned, and unable to make choices about their lives.

      Author Biography

      Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949 in Ashiya City, Japan, a suburb of Kobe. The son of two high-school Japanese literature teachers, Murakami became fascinated with American pop culture as a teenager and began reading works of American literature in English

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