Murakami renders a world in which an aura of surrealism pervades everyday life: cause and effect change place, memory and illusion change the shape of the present moment, the most ordinary thoughts and actions result in the most unexpected revelations and events. And so it is in these seventeen spare, mesmerizing, serenely funny stones. The narrator of the title story - obsessed with the unaccountable disappearance of an elephant from the local elephant house - thinks he may have glimpsed what only seems impossible . . . the protagonist of another story knows that she has taken part in an impossible reality when she telepathically slays a small green monster who has just proposed marriage to her . . . a store clerk's reply to a letter of complaint reveals the vast clutter of his own thoughts, at the center of which hangs his theory of "The Nobility of Imperfection". . sleeplessness becomes a foretaste of death for a young mother. . . a man's life is invaded by TV People who may be illusory but nonetheless have a surer sense of what's really going on than he does. . . a young man invited into the carefully preserved room of a stranger's absent daughter begins to sense the armature of fiction beneath the malleable surface of recollection.

Contents

• The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women
• The Second Bakery Attack
• The Kangaroo Communique
• On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning
• Sleep
• The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds
• Lederhosen
• Barn Burning
• The Little Green Monster
• Family Affair
• A Window
• TV People
• A Slow Boat to China
• The Dancing Dwarf
• The Last Lawn of the Afternoon
• The Silence
• The Elephant Vanishes