![]() ![]() Hear the Wind Sing won the prestigious Gunzo Award, a first-novel prize, and the book launched Murakami's career as the leading fiction writer of Japan's post-war generation. In 1979, Murakami published his first book, a novel entitled Hear the Wind Sing, which he first wrote in English and then translated into Japanese. With Takahashi, Murakami opened a jazz bar called the Peter Cat in a Tokyo suburb in 1974, and together, they managed the club until 1981, when Murakami began devoting himself full-time to his writing. In 1971, he had married fellow Waseda student Yoko Takahashi. In 1968, he began studies at Tokyo's Waseda University, eventually graduating with bachelor's degrees in screenwriting and Greek drama in 1975. 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 as an adolescent. ![]() Haruki Murakami was born on Januin Ashiya City, Japan, a suburb of Kobe. 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. 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. He also discusses the strange circumstances of the elephant's disappearance, which indicate that the elephant apparently vanished into thin air. 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. An unnamed narrator tells the story of how an aged elephant and its keeper mysteriously disappear one night from his town's elephant house. Like other stories in this collection, "The Elephant Vanishes" focuses on a strange incident that leaves its protagonist disoriented. The Elephant Vanishes: Stories consists of seventeen short stories told in first-person point of view. The short story was also included in the anthology The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Theodore Goossen. Jay Rubin translated the story from Japanese into English. 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. ![]()
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