SOURCE: A review of The Elephant Vanishes, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, Spring, 1994, pp. 434–35.

In the following review, Loughman discusses the sense of emptiness conveyed by the themes and characters of The Elephant Vanishes.

Among Japanese writers born after the war whose work has been translated into English, Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) has received the most attention, especially since the 1989 publication in English of his 1982 novel Hitsuji o megaru bōken (Eng. A Wild Sheep Chase; see WLT 64:4, p. 701). The Elephant Vanishes is the first collection of his short stories, many of which have appeared elsewhere, including several in the New Yorker and in the recent anthologies Monkey Brain Sushi and New Japanese Voices (both 1991; see WLT 66:2, p. 406).

Readers familiar with Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs will recognize the pervasive sense of emptiness in the stories here—but with a difference. Whereas Barthes found an empty center in signs...