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1. The Dancing Dwarf Murakami Pdf Gratis

March 28, 1993

By DAVID LEAVITT

ew cultures excite or upset the American imagination as tenaciously as Japan's. News of life on that leapfrog of islands streams relentlessly through our televisions and newspapers, alternately offending and enthralling us. What kind of country is this, we wonder, that can produce Noh drama and cram schools, zen gardens and Nintendo games? American writers can't seem to get enough of Japan, which has become for some -- Jay McInerney, Brad Leit hauser and John Burnham Schwartz among them -- a magnet for expatriate adventuring. For writers like Michael Crichton, on the other hand, Japan is a predator nation out to destroy the American way of business -- a convenient scapegoat in a melodrama of economic espionage.

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami provides a different point of view in 'The Elephant Vanishes,' his first collection of stories. (He is also the author of the novels 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' and 'A Wild Sheep Chase.') These stories, ably translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, show us Japan as it's experienced from the inside. What is exotic to foreigners -- oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks -- is here the stuff of ordinary life; but so are McDonald's, steak and Julio Iglesias. Indeed, Mr. Murakami's Japan is such an unquestioned hybrid of tradition and export that one has to read 11 pages into the first story before the most casual reference to a 'Tokyoite' signals that we aren't in America. His narrators -- young, urban, downwardly mobile -- are as likely to eat spaghetti as soba noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock, but disdain 'stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth.' They read Len Deighton novels and 'War and Peace,' not Kobo Abe and 'The Tale of Genji.' Their universe is Japanese, but their cultural reference points are almost exclusively Western.

This is a Japan characterized by a peculiar spiritual torpor. Bizarre events take place regularly, but fail to generate much reaction or curiosity. In 'The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women,' for instance, a young man's search for a missing cat leads him into a closed-off alley that passes between the backyards of parallel houses, a path 'neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal.' There he encounters a sunbathing teen-age girl who, like the alley itself, seems both of the ordinary world and strangely apart from it. But their rambling conversation is too lazy to be truly flirtatious.

Haruki Murakami, pdf version of a short story (online/Blackboard) Course description: What is the “coming of age” experience after 1945, which marked the end of several global atrocities (the Atom Bomb, the Holocaust) and the beginning of new revolutions for individuals, communities, and nations?

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Similarly, in 'A Window,' another young man, this one a writing teacher who works for a correspondence school, pays a visit to one of his pupils, a married woman in her early 30's. Their few hours together eating hamburger steak and listening to Burt Bacha rach linger for years in the narrator's memory. 'The weather was lovely that day,' he recalls, 'and over the railings of the building's verandas hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance.' Again, nothing happens. The wife and the teacher are 'like two would-be passengers who had missed the same train,' linked not so much by a shared passion as a shared sense of absence.

Most of Mr. Murakami's stories have a fabulistic edge. 'The Dancing Dwarf' takes place in one of those impressively efficient Japanese factories we're always hearing about, only in this case the factory manufactures elephants: 'Assigned to the ear section that month, I worked in the building with the yellow ceiling and posts. My helmet and pants were also yellow. . . . The month before, I had been assigned to the green building, where I wore a green helmet and pants and made heads.'

In 'TV People,' human mutants 'reduced' by 20 or 30 percent -- 'figures that look far away even close up' -- invade the narrator's home and office. 'From the time the TV People come into the apartment to the moment they leave,' he tells us, 'I don't budge. . . . Not to excuse myself, but you have people right in front of you denying your very presence like that, then see if you don't doubt whether you actually exist.'

And in the haunting title story, another elephant mysteriously disappears, along with its keeper, from the enclosure where it has been kept as a kind of mascot for a Tokyo suburb. Again, the solution to the mystery hinges on questions of perspective and proportion.

In fact, all the stories in 'The Elephant Vanishes' take place in parallel worlds not so much remote from ordinary life as hidden within its surfaces: secret alleys that afford unexpected -- and unsettling -- views. Mysteries are offered that defy solution or analysis. Their purpose, rather, is to point out not only how much we don't know but how much we can't know. As a result, the tendency of certain people and situations to defy description -- to most writers a bane -- becomes for Mr. Murakami something to revel in.

In the story called 'Sleep,' for example, a young woman suddenly discovers that she no longer needs it. Awakened literally and figuratively, she observes that there is something strange about her husband's face, but finds herself at a loss to articulate the source of this strangeness. 'Honestly,' she observes, ' 'strange' is about all that fits. . . . The one thing I could remember was that his face looked strange.'

Likewise, in 'The Second Bakery Attack' a young man discovers that his wife keeps a shotgun and ski masks in the car, even though 'neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt.' One recalls the maxim given by the correspondence-school writing teacher in 'A Window,' who says to his student: 'Don't try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing.'

Makeshift indeed. Yet even in the slipperiest of Mr. Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out: pull tabs from beer cans lying in an ashtray 'like scales from a mermaid'; shotgun shells rustling 'like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow'; melted ice working its way through a cocktail 'like a tiny ocean current.'

'After I gave up sleeping,' the narrator of 'Sleep' observes, 'it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. . . . Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition.' In this observation she reveals her kinship with the narrator of 'The Elephant Vanishes,' who continues, after the disappearance, 'to sell refrigerators and toaster ovens and coffee makers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of memories I retain from that world.' Yet he, like his sleepless contemporary, doesn't live there anymore.

It's as if a kind of social schism has taken hold in this culture so intent on efficiency and productivity, a schism between the visible street and the hidden alley that resists simple resolution. In Mr. Murakami's view, 'people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function.' The problem, as he notes in a story called 'The Last Lawn of the Afternoon,' is that 'no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another.'

No metaphor could suit more exactly these stories in which animals -- elephants, kangaroos, windup birds, even a tragically mistreated 'little green monster' -- figure so crucially. These stories, like the kittens themselves, are 'warm with life, hopelessly' -- and, I would add, wonderfully -- 'unstable.'

The Dancing Dwarf Murakami Pdf Gratis

David Leavitt's most recent book is a collection of stories, 'A Place I've Never Been.' His new novel, 'While England Sleeps,' will be published this fall.