Marriage and Relationships

Marriage and Relationships

Analyzing short story compilations is a lot more difficult than analyzing a novel since one has to assess every individual story and then one way or another analyze the full collection as a whole. Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes" is a collection of 17 short stories that was originally published in English in November 1991. The short stories are told in the first-person point of view. In most of the stories, Murakami includes bizarre events and things purely because they make the stories more fascinating. Murakami's characters are also nebulous and names are not used. The narrator is generally a detached middle-class man plunged into a strange situation, and he is sometimes paired with a wife or lady character who he feels alienated from in some way.

First story analysis

An analysis of The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women

"The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women" is a short story that exposes a lot about the institution of marriage. The story starts with the unidentified protagonist making spaghetti while listening to La Gazza Ladra by Rossini. A room away the phone rings and he immediately is thrown down a path that he stays for the remainder of day. His deeds demonstrate that although he has grown to grasp several responsibilities, he shows his childish side with no self-control. From the account of how he gave up his well paying, stable job with nothing to show for it, and the manner in which he communicates with the people around him. To some extent, this is a true depiction of marriage because many men are a little bit boyish when they get into marriage and remain so for the rest of their lives.

When an unidentified individual on the phone requests for 10 minutes of his time, he is evidently aggravated, and replies to them harshly and swiftly before (a lot to his shock), the anonymous caller hangs up on him. The protagonist wanted to hang up on the woman but she stole the satisfaction away from him. This causes him to get annoyed for the entire day. Later on during the same day his spouse calls him, and when she requests him to look for their cat in an abandoned home he gets very annoyed. He immediately questions how she knew off the deserted home and his indifference for the animal is evident from his words. He is barely into his blameful speech when his wife interrupts him, and hangs up on him for the second time in the same day. Shortly after, the first woman calls back, and starts to depict her 'appealing' body in graphic detail. Disgusted and confused, he hangs up. After thinking about the day's events, his exasperation ultimately leads him outside the house to carry out tasks his wife had told him to do.

The buying of the groceries and payment bills are the tasks that he definitively does that day. He arrives home and begins to look for his wife's cat, just to be sidetracked by a young girl determined to seize his time. She persuades him to sit down and watch look for his cat from afar. After he offers her a cigarette, she ends up telling him about her abstract concepts about death. He falls asleep and finds himself alone when awakens. The manner in which he had observed the girl's body, looking at her unnatural walk, her ideal ears and her exposing clothing differs sharply with the way he had dismissed the anonymous lady's