SOURCE: “Disorder Out of Chaos,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 4, 1993, pp. 3, 11.

In the following review, Ulin describes the general style, themes, principal characters, and tone of Murakami's short fiction in The Elephant Vanishes.

For better or worse, we live today in an atmosphere of cultural cross-pollination, where words and images are transmitted across continents at the speed of television, and the writing of one society can influence the writers of another until the idea of boundaries becomes nearly irrelevant.

In some circles, it's fashionable to lament this process, to see it as responsible for a kind of mass homogenization that will ultimately render all of us, no matter where we live, as mostly the same. But such laments neglect the basic fact of imagination, the human race's great saving grace. After all, if, as E. M. Forster once said, the purpose of literature is to record...