Revisiting “The Elephant Vanishes”

I recently re-read Haruki Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes,” a short story in a collection by the same name that came out in 1993, but the story originally made an appearance in The New Yorker in 1991.

The first time I read the story was in an undergraduate creative writing workshop that I took in the early 2000s, while I was working at Webster University in St. Louis. I fell in love with the story then, about a man who lives in a Tokyo suburb that’s home to an elephant, the one remaining resident from a down-at-the-heel zoo that was forced to close. The town is mystified when the elephant and its trainer simply vanish one day and leave no trace of where they went or how the elephant got out of its cage. In the ending of the story, the narrator explains how he was the last person to see the elephant and its trainer, and he knows how they may have escaped.

I knew it was a story I wanted to discuss in one of my workshops this semester, but I’d left my copy of the collection at home in St. Louis. Fortunately, I was able to find the version that ran in The New Yorker and the university’s gods of copyright handled the rest so we could make copies. While I was home, I grabbed my copy of the book and brought it back to Vancouver with me.

After I read the New Yorker version, something about it didn’t sit quite right with me. When I got my copy of the book, I figured out why:

The endings were different.

Not materially different in the events that take place, but there are two paragraphs in the book version that are absent from the New Yorker version. Reading the two of them now, I’m looking at those two paragraphs and wondering why they made such a big difference back then, and I’m also wondering, is it better with them or without them? What would my experience of the story have been like if I’d read it in The New Yorker first? I can’t go back and unread them, so I’m hoping that it’ll make for an interesting discussion in workshop.