SOURCE: “Doing without Feeling,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 19, 1993, p. 23.

In the following review, McCue focuses on the indifferent descriptions and emotional detachment of Murakami's narrative style in The Elephant Vanishes.

Haruki Murakami's people are mostly youngish, middle-class, educated, smart and, without realizing it, disaffected. They are caught up in jobs, property, habits, relationships, marriages which mean nothing—but they are not looking for meanings. Each day is unexceptionable, except that each day is unexceptional. “It was another beautiful, cloudless day, just like yesterday. In fact, it was like a continuation of yesterday. …”

Then comes the interruption, the something to make you think. It may be a Kafkaesque monster crawling out of the earth, a mysterious phone call or a dream about a dwarf; but whatever it is, it is meant to act as a hinge between the mundane and the significant. This unpredictable event usually doesn't come...