Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Feb 07, 2010

oriana rated it:

Gosh, I can't believe I haven't got this on my list yet. And I am seriously due for a re-read.

Not only was the book amazing (I truly believe he can do no wrong), but one of my best friends and I saw an actual play of this several years ago at Lincoln Center. We had seats in the very front row. The play (as required, I'm sure) was balls-out crazy, all in Japanese, with a ticker doing subtitles at the the top of the stage. My memory sucks, but I think I recall a bunch of people with st More...

5 comments like (12 people liked it)

Nov 02, 2008

Fiona rated it:

apathetic

Every protagonist in Murakami's books (though, I've only read this and 'Norwegian Wood') are apathetic. They just float through their lives, never really caring about what is happening, or if there is anything they can do to fix it.
I think to some readers this could be quite tedious, but there is something real about these characters because of their apathy. Through the bizarre situations the characters face, the reader can relate on some level.

The first More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2007

Platoeatssouls rated it:

What can I say about Haruki Murakami? He is famous, both in Japan and abroad, although in the States those who know him tend to be Literary Hipsters who are interested in Asia. He writes novels and short stories, although his novels tend to be a bit disjointed and episodic, hinged like a Jacob's ladder. His short stories will always employ a simile at the top of the second page which may seem at times deep and yet simple.

When I started reading The Elephant Vanishes, I wasn't rea More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 07, 2010

Amari rated it:

I've been deeply disappointed in Murakami before, and I seem to remember that they're always short stories that I have found useless. But this collection floats my boat. I agree with some reviews I've read that complain of the lack of variety in the protagonists' situations -- they're, almost to a one, loners, bored, alienated, and around 30. Most of them are experiencing some kind of freakish alteration in the world around them which, I take, we are meant to interpret as changes in themselves. More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Joe rated it:

murakami short stories rock my socks. on a purely structural level, his sentence composition is brilliant. short, descriptive, simple, and undeniably beautiful in a way that perhaps only a writer with an eastern perspective could achieve. sometimes his sentences make you feel as if you are gazing from the summit of a mountain with no one else around. besides that, his blend of the absurd with the bitterly mundane is a juxtaposition that only the most skilled writer could pull off. with bizarre t More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 20, 2010

Secnud rated it:

This was my first Murakami book and I loved it. Each of the stories is eloquent in bringing to the concious mind, facts hidden in the rececesses of our brains until someone points it out...in a story...told in a humorous way by Haruki Murakami!
Whether its how our imposed conceptions blind us to a truth staring right in the face or how a simple question by a stranger can set you off on a depressing monologue that is surely funny to the everybody else but you..the writer is a real genious.
More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 30, 2011

Endrina added it

I enjoy Murakami's books - to a certain degree. They always seem a bit too long, and I tend to lose interest. On the other hand, his short-stories are...too short. Well, that's not really the issue. I was disappointed to find that several of them are actually chapters from his books - chapters I have read before. So I ended up reading some pages, skipping to the next, reading some more...yeah, you got it. Then, the one's I hadn't read seemed pointless.
Now, I'm not one for short-stories in More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 11, 2012

Nemesis rated it:

Il magnifico mondo surreale di Murakami

Lo so, sembrerò ripetitiva, banale e noiosa, ma ormai mi sento completamente ammaliata e rapita da questo geniale scrittore.
Sono rimasta impressionata dal suo stile dopo la lettura di “Norwegian Wood” e da allora non sono più riuscita a staccarmene, ho approfondito sempre più la sua conoscenza leggendo tutte le sue altre opere(o perlomeno quelle che sono riuscita a trovare dato che dove abito io sembra che questo scrittore viva su un altro p More...

0 comments like

Nov 09, 2011

Kp rated it:

I got this one short story free from Audible.com so I figured I'd listen since I had really liked his book Norwegian Wood. Well, this one was back to Murakami's weird fantasy type writing. It was ok, but... well, pretty strange and it seemed meaningless to me. I guess really it was all about the narrator and how strange he was... but so what?

Here's a quote from a review I read that sums up his style to me:
"If Hemingway writes using the iceberg method, where the bulk of More...

0 comments like

Jul 27, 2011

Eric rated it:

Wonderful characterization in every story. I have yet to read any of his novels yet but I've heard nothing but praise. If he can immerse you so quietly and yet so strongly into his narrator's head so well in these short pieces I can only imagine the depth in his novels.

I was at the very least amused by each story though i will admit there were one or two where I wasn't entirely gripped by the predicament. One or two cases where I didn't feel grounded enough in the more bizarre aspects of those p More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 02, 2011

Gavin rated it:

I have only 2 complaints, which are scarcely complaints. One is that, stylistically, the stories all read similarly. The narrator might as well always be the same character, though it's true that in many cases it actually is (and this I appreciate). It's not monotonous at all, at least not in a collection of this length, but I wonder if all of Murakami's novels are also like this. Even when the narrator is a woman, I half-internalise it as the man from all the other stories.

The secon More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 25, 2010

Tanabrus rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

May 12, 2010

Paula rated it:

‘The Elephant Vanishes’ starts with the story ‘The Wind-up Bird And Tuesday's Women’ which was updated and became the first chapter of ‘The Wind Up Bird Chronicle’ (one of my favourite books by Haruki Murakami), so it was a nice beginning to a great collections of stories, All of the stories were different in their own way and as always with Haruki Murakami very open to interpretation, the beauty of his writing is what you take from it, I am still thinking about the story ‘Sleep’, maybe because More...

0 comments like

Jul 05, 2010

Alexander rated it:

"This might be a strange way to put it," he took off again, spreading both hands, then bringing them slowly together before his eyes. "But there's a lot of barns in this world, and I've got this feeling that they're all just waiting to be burned. Barns built way off by the seaside, barns built in the middle of rice fields... well, anyway, all kinds of barns. But nothing that fifteen minutes wouldn't burn down, nice and neat. It's like that's why they were put there from the very b More...

0 comments like

Mar 16, 2010

Matthew rated it:

I would give this book a better rating if it wasn't for a few of the Short's that are in the collection. Don't get me wrong, I like Murakami, he is an excellent author, but I have my reasons for giving this book 3 stars.

Let me talk about the good parts at least. My favorite stories in the novel are: The Silence, The Little Green Monster and The Second Bakery Attack. Out of those three, The Silence is what stands out for me the most. It is just a simple retelling of a persons past, th More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 21, 2012

Emily rated it:

- Fave stories: "The Kangaroo Communique", "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning", "Sleep", "Barn Burning" (fave), "The Dancing Dwarf", "The Silence", "The Elephant Vanishes"

- Least fave: "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women", "The Little Green Monster", "TV People", "A Slow Boat to China"

- I liked that certain elements repeated throughout stor More...

0 comments like

Aug 04, 2011

James rated it:

Murakami manages to keep me riveted in ways that I don't even fully understand. If most of these stories were pitched to me as an editor, I'd think they were somewhere between banal and stupidly fanciful in the way of a story that a seven year-old might tell. But in his hands, they're transfixing. They'd be transfiguring as well, except that sometimes he leaves you with so little to hold on to at the end of a piece that you're left just with a feeling like "what just happened?"
More...

0 comments like

Mar 01, 2010

Sheela rated it:

The Elephant Vanishes was a mixed bag. This collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami was a far improvement to his disaster of a book, Kafka on the Shore. But, it's still not my favorite assortment of short stories. The stories that were good were really really great - amazing, actually. In fact, I read some of the stories twice because I enjoyed them so much (i.e the couple who wants to rob bakeries, but instead decides to rob a McDonald's). The stories that I found fascinating illustr More...

0 comments like

Apr 17, 2011

Andrew added it

This is my first stab at Murakami's shorter-length work. I loved the four novels of his I'd read before (Kafka on the Shore, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, The Wind-Up Bird Chroncile and Norwegian Wood) even though they're fairly disparate. A lot of Murakami fans hate Norwegian Wood.

There are two kinds of stories in this book. There are the realistic (or, rather, realistic enough-- no unicorns or malevolent spirits) stories about mindless consumer culture and gritty reality. And then th More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 23, 2011

––––•(-•The Insomniac Book Hoarder•- rated it:

My love for it ,stems from Haruki's very interesting scenarios laden with ambiguos endings. As well as a comical if not cinematic approach to mundane tasks and everyday human behaviours. I laughed my heart out when I read about the Mc.Donald's incident and the dire need to consume a number of big macs due to cravings. Initially I have regarded myself as the woman from Sleep and the way she had found some sort of freedom while others are deep in their slumber. I have no trouble sleeping, but in s More...

0 comments like

Feb 17, 2011

Dina rated it:

Classic Murakami. In my opinion, with him you are always guaranteed at least 2 things: an attack on the normal and a somewhat elitist taste in music. I must say that I prefer Murakami as a novelist as opposed to Murakami as a short-story writer, because i think that he doesn't somehow manage to reach the finish line very successfully as latter. I always feel a dose of fledgling penmanship in his short stories that I have never encountered in his novels, which carry the reader steadily from the b More...

0 comments like

May 27, 2010

Jeff rated it:

Good selection of stories where something always seems to be missing, a cat, an elephant, or sanity. At some point most of the characters in this book of short stories seems to have gone off track. Something is missing, a paralegal suddenly doesn't want to pursue law, a couple so hungry they hold up a McDonalds, a woman who can no longer sleep, and an elephant that vanishes.

The stories seem to represent a sort of "quarter-life" crisis for the characters. A lack of directio More...

0 comments like

Apr 26, 2009

Jack rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Jan 07, 2009

Yanni rated it:

The way in some of his stories that he builds such a "normal" world - everyday suburban life that is so utterly "abnormal" is astonishing and far more creepy than out and out brutality and violence. Like those bad dreams in which nothing much is actually bad, but the whole of reality just seems "wrong" - smells wrong, tastes wrong and sounds wrong, as though it has had the reality sucked out of it - which of course it has, since it is a dream. Duh! Oddly, I have More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 03, 2009

Emily rated it:

after devouring his book of short stories, i can safely say that murakami is now one of my all-time favorite writers. his engaging voice immediately drew me in from the very first sentence: "i'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls." interestingly, spaghetti makes a couple more appearances throughout the various short stories in this book, as does the name "noboru watanabe" (alternatively a cat, a future brother-in-law, and an old elephant caretaker), and car More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 25, 2008

Vince rated it:

I'm still reading, but here is an excerpt from my blog at www.vincemontague.com:

I finished the Elephant Vanishes, and like after completing any volume of writing, the work begins to be digested, slowly, and random thoughts culled during the reading come more precisely into view.

I couldn’t help but consider two questions: why do I like this writer? What is he writing about?

It’s always tricky with works in translation, but with Murakami his voice seems consisten More...

0 comments like

Nov 22, 2009

Candiss rated it:

I really enjoyed this selection by Murakami, although - as is usual for me upon reading a collection of short stories - I really feel I would need to rate each story separately to give an accurate picture of my feelings on the book. There were (from my perspective) some stellar 5s, as well as some solid 3.5s/4s...and a couple of meh 2s/3s.

Murakami is a terrifically talented writer who approaches each subject from just a few degrees off-center. Even in the most mundane circumstanc More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2009

Nicole rated it:

These stories are really beautiful - simple and direct and with stunning interactions between some of the characters. In another group of stories, or in the hands of a different author, these things might be enough, but Murakami weaves in tasty little bits of surreality on top of and beneath and in between the traditional elements he uses. In some of the stories, the surreal takes center stage ("The Little Green Monster," "TV People," "The Dancing Dwarf"), which wor More...

0 comments like

May 04, 2011

Louize rated it:

The Elephant Vanishes is a merger between reality and the bizarre without actually defining the difference. The characters experience unnatural circumstances pushing them to bridge the gap between the norm and the supernatural, allowing for dreamlike things to cross into their slow and quiet lives. Circumstances they won’t voluntarily talk about but neither will forget.

“I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions ar

More...

5 comments like (6 people liked it)

Sep 04, 2009

Nick rated it:

* The feeling that the most important moment or character has been cut from the story, leaving you intentionally stranded.
* A realization that the narrator has been hypnotized, but the author does not say by whom or for what purpose.
* Something like deja-vu, where you are reminded of something significant from your childhood but can't remember it clearly.
* The feeling of looking at a painting which evokes a powerful set of emotions with senseless patterns then tryi More...

1 comment like