Murakami, Murakami, Murakami… how I, we, almost everybody, adores his literary works. Personally speaking, I tend to indulge in one of his novels roughly once or twice a year, as if to savour them.
Slight tangent aside, The Elephant Vanishes isn’t actually a novel, but rather a 2005 collection of seventeen short stories the long-praised author wrote between 1980–1991—during the same period where he produced (one of) his most well-known novels, Norwegian Wood.
Although I have limited experience with Murakami’s short stories, The Elephant Vanishes seems to contain many brief pieces of fiction that focus on a variety of things, with whimsical elements and the idea of quitting/leaving something both being core themes of many of the stories included.
It strikes me as a suitably odd, but probably faintly self-aware and snarky, collection of stories; Murakami tends to always feel like he is toying with you one way or another. Regardless, I certainly look forward to reading it, and if you’re a fan of the famed Japanese author, or just a general connoisseur of short fiction, perhaps you should check out The Elephant Vanishes as well.
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