The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

  I’ll never get the key. I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to turn it over.

  —translated by Jay Rubin

  1.

  THE FALL

  OF THE

  ROMAN EMPIRE

  I FIRST NOTICED the wind had begun to blow in the afternoon on Sunday. Or more precisely, at seven past two in the afternoon.

  At the time, just like always—just like I always do on Sunday afternoons, that is—I was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to some innocuous music while catching up on a week’s worth of entries in my diary. I make a practice of jotting down each day’s events throughout the week, then writing them up on Sunday.

  I’d just finished with the three days up through Tuesday when I became aware of the strong winds droning past my window. I canned the diary entries, capped my pen, and went out to the veranda to take in the laundry. The things on the line were all aflutter, whipping out loud, dry cracks, streaming their crazed comet tails off into space.

  When I least suspected it, the wind seemed to have picked up out of nowhere. Hanging out the laundry on the veranda in the morning—at eighteen past ten in the morning, to be exact—there hadn’t been the slightest whisper of a breeze. About that my memory is as airtight as the lid on a blast furnace. Because for a second there I’d even thought: No need for clothespins on such a calm day.

  There honest to goodness hadn’t been a puff of air moving anywhere.

  Swiftly gathering up the laundry, I then went around shutting all the windows in the apartment. Once the windows were closed, I could hardly hear the wind at all. Outside in the absence of sound, the trees—Himalayan cedars and chestnuts, mostly—squirmed like dogs with an uncontrollable itch. Swatches of cloud cover slipped across the sky and out of sight like shifty-eyed secret agents, while on the veranda of an apartment across the way several shirts had wrapped themselves around a plastic clothesline and were clinging frantically, like abandoned orphans.

  It’s really blowing up a gale, I thought.

  Upon opening the newspaper and checking out the weather map, however, I didn’t find any sign of a typhoon. The probability of rainfall was listed at 0%. A peaceful Sunday afternoon like the heyday of the Roman Empire, it was supposed to have been.

  I let out a slight, maybe 30% sigh and folded up the newspaper, tidied the laundry away in the chest of drawers, made coffee while listening to more of the same innocuous music, then carried on with my diary keeping over a hot cup.

  Thursday, I slept with my girlfriend. She likes to wear a blindfold during sex. She always carries around a piece of cloth in her airline overnight bag just for that purpose.

  Not my thing, really, but she looks so cute blindfolded like that, I can’t very well object. We’re all human, after all, and everybody’s got something a little off somewhere.

  That’s pretty much what I wrote for the Thursday entry in my diary. Eighty percent facts, 20% short comments, that’s my diary policy.

  Friday, I ran into an old friend in a Ginza bookstore. He was wearing a tie with the most ungodly pattern. Telephone numbers, a whole slew of them, on a striped background—I’d gotten that far when the telephone rang.

  2.

  THE 1881

  INDIAN

  UPRISING

  IT WAS THIRTY-SIX past two by the clock when the telephone rang. Probably her—my girlfriend with the thing about blindfolds, that is—or so I thought. She’d planned on coming over on Sunday anyway, and she always makes a point of ringing up beforehand. It was her job to buy groceries for dinner. We’d decided on oyster hot pot for that evening.

  Anyway, it was two-thirty-six in the afternoon when the telephone rang. I have the alarm clock sitting right next to the telephone. That way I always see the clock when I go for the telephone, so I recall that much perfectly.

  Yet when I picked up the receiver, all I could hear was this fierce wind blowing. A rummmmmble full of fury, like the Indians all rising on the warpath in 1881, right there in the receiver. They were burning pioneer cabins, cutting telegraph lines, raping Candice Bergen.

  “Hello?” I ventured, but my lone voice got sucked under the overwhelming tumult of history.

  “Hello? Hello?” I shouted out loud, again to no avail.

  Straining my ears, I could just barely make out the faintest catches of what might have been a woman’s voice through the wind. Or then again, maybe I was hearing things. Whatever, the wind was too strong to be sure. And I guess too many buffalo had already bitten the dust.

  I couldn’t say a word. I just stood there with the receiver to my ear. Hard and fast, I had the thing practically glued to my ear. I almost thought it wasn’t going to come off. But then, after fifteen or twenty seconds like that, the telephone cut off. It was as if a lifeline had snapped in a seizure. After which a vast and empty silence, warmthless as overbleached underwear, was all that remained.

  3.

  HITLER’S

  INVASION

  OF POLAND

  That does it. I let out another sigh. And I continued with my diary, thinking I’d better just finish logging it in.

  Saturday, Hitler’s armored divisions invaded Poland. Dive bombers over Warsaw—

  No, that’s not right. That’s not what happened. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was on September 1, 1939. Not yesterday. After dinner yesterday, I went to the movies and saw Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice. Hitler’s invasion of Poland only figured in the film.

  In the film, Meryl Streep divorces Dustin Hoffman, but then in a commuter train she meets this civil engineer played by Robert De Niro, and remarries. A pretty all-right movie.

  Sitting next to me was a high-school couple, and they kept touching each other on the tummy the whole time. Not bad at all, your high-school student’s tummy. Even me, time was I used to have a high-school student’s tummy.

  4.

  AND THE

  REALM OF

  RAGING

  WINDS

  ONCE I’D SQUARED away the previous week’s worth in my diary, I sat myself down in front of the record rack and picked out some music for a windy Sunday afternoon’s listening. I settled on a Shostakovich cello concerto and a Sly and the Family Stone album, selections that seemed suitable enough for high winds, and I listened to these two records one after the other.

  Every so often, things would strafe past the window. A white sheet flying east to west like some sorcerer brewing an elixir of roots and herbs. A long, flimsy tin sign arching its sickly spine like an anal-sex enthusiast.

  I was taking in the scene outside to the strains of the Shostakovich cello concerto when again the telephone rang. The alarm clock beside the telephone read 3:48.

  I picked up the receiver fully expecting that Boeing 747 jet-engine roar, but this time there was no wind to be heard.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said, too.

  “I was just thinking about heading over with the fixings for the oyster hot pot, okay?” said my girlfriend. She’ll be on her way with groceries and a blindfold.

  “Fine by me, but—”

  “You have a casserole?”

  “Yes, but,” I say, “what gives? I don’t hear that wind anymore.”

  “Yeah, the wind’s stopped. Here in Nakano it let up at three twenty-five. So I don’t imagine it’ll be long before it lets up over there.”

  “Maybe so,” I said as I hung up the telephone, then took down the casserole from the above-closet storage compartment and washed it in the sink.

  Just as she had predicted, the winds stopped, at 4:05 on the dot. I opened the windows and looked around outside. Directly below, a black dog was intently sniffing around at the ground. For fifteen or twenty minutes, the dog kept at it tirelessly. I couldn’t imagine why the dog felt so compelled.


  Other than that, though, the appearances and workings of the world remained unchanged from before the winds had started. The Himalayan cedars and chestnuts stood their open ground, aloof as if nothing had transpired. Laundry hung limply from plastic clotheslines. Atop the telephone poles, crows gave a flap or two of their wings, their beaks shiny as credit cards.

  Meanwhile during all of this, my girlfriend had shown up and began to prepare the hot pot. She stood there in the kitchen cleaning the oysters, briskly chopping Chinese cabbage, arranging blocks of tofu just so, simmering broth.

  I asked her whether she hadn’t tried telephoning at 2:36.

  “I called, all right,” she answered while rinsing rice in a colander.

  “I couldn’t hear a thing,” I said.

  “Yeah, right, the wind was tremendous,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I got a beer out of the refrigerator and sat down on the edge of the table to drink it.

  “But, really, why all of a sudden this fury of wind, then, again, just like that, nothing?” I asked her.

  “You got me,” she said, her back turned toward me as she shelled shrimps with her fingernails. “There’s lots we don’t know about the wind. Same as there’s lots we don’t know about ancient history or cancer or the ocean floor or outer space or sex.”

  “Hmm,” I said. That was no answer. Still, it didn’t look like there was much chance of furthering this line of conversation with her, so I just gave up and watched the oyster hot pot’s progress.

  “Say, can I touch your tummy?” I asked her.

  “Later,” she said.

  So until the hot pot was ready, I decided to pull together a few brief notes on the day’s events so I could write them up in my diary next week. This is what I jotted down:

  Fall of Roman Empire

  1881 Indian Uprising

  Hitler’s Invasion of Poland

  Just this, and even next week I’d be able to reconstruct what went on today. Precisely because of this meticulous system of mine, I have managed to keep a diary for twenty-two years without missing a day. To every meaningful act, its own system. Whether the wind blows or not, that’s the way I live.

  —translated by Alfred Birnbaum

  “MOTHER DUMPED MY FATHER,” a friend of my wife’s was saying one day, “all because of a pair of shorts.”

  I’ve got to ask. “A pair of shorts?”

  “I know it sounds strange,” she says, “because it is a strange story.”

  A LARGE WOMAN, her height and build are almost the same as mine. She tutors electric organ, but most of her free time she divides among swimming and skiing and tennis, so she’s trim and always tanned. You might call her a sports fanatic. On days off, she puts in a morning run before heading to the local pool to do laps; then at two or three in the afternoon it’s tennis, followed by aerobics. Now, I like my sports, but I’m nowhere near her league.

  I don’t mean to suggest she’s aggressive or obsessive about things. Quite the contrary, she’s really rather retiring; she’d never dream of putting emotional pressure on anyone. Only, she’s driven; her body—and very likely the spirit attached to that body—craves after vigorous activity, relentless as a comet.

  Which may have something to do with why she’s unmarried. Oh, she’s had affairs—the woman may be a little on the large side, but she is beautiful; she’s been proposed to, even agreed to take the plunge. But inevitably, whenever it’s gotten to the wedding stage, some problem has come up and everything falls through.

  Like my wife says, “She’s just unlucky.”

  “Well, I guess,” I sympathize.

  I’m not in total agreement with my wife on this. True, luck may rule over parts of a person’s life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there’s a will—much less a strong will to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers—there’s a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around. No, her heart was never set on marrying, is how I see it. Marriage just doesn’t fall within the sweep of her comet, at least not entirely.

  And so she keeps on tutoring electric organ, devoting every free moment to sports, falling regularly in and out of unlucky love.

  IT’S A RAINY SUNDAY afternoon and she’s come two hours earlier than expected, while my wife is still out shopping.

  “Forgive me,” she apologizes. “I took a rain check on today’s tennis, which left me two hours to spare. I’d have been bored out of my mind being alone at home, so I just thought … Am I interrupting anything?”

  Not at all, I say. I didn’t feel quite in the mood to work and was just sitting around, cat on my lap, watching a video. I show her in, go to the kitchen and make coffee. Two cups, for watching the last twenty minutes of Jaws. Of course, we’ve both seen the movie before—probably more than once—so neither of us is particularly riveted to the tube. But anyway, we’re watching it because it’s there in front of our eyes.

  It’s The End. The credits roll up. No sign of my wife. So we chat a bit. Sharks, seaside, swimming … still no wife. We go on talking. Now, I suppose I like the woman well enough, but after an hour of this our lack of things in common becomes obvious. In a word, she’s my wife’s friend, not mine.

  Short of what else to do, I’m already thinking about popping in the next video when she suddenly brings up the story of her parents’ divorce. I can’t fathom the connection—at least to my mind, there’s no link between swimming and her folks splitting up—but I guess a reason is where you find it.

  “THEY WEREN’T REALLY SHORTS,” she says. “They were lederhosen.”

  “You mean those hiking pants the Germans wear? The ones with the shoulder straps?”

  “You got it. Father wanted a pair of lederhosen as a souvenir gift. Well, Father’s pretty tall for his generation. He might even look good in them, which could be why he wanted them. But can you picture a Japanese wearing lederhosen? I guess it takes all kinds.”

  I’m still not any closer to the story. I have to ask, what were the circumstances behind her father’s request—and of whom?— for these souvenir lederhosen?

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m always telling things out of order. Stop me if things don’t make sense,” she says.

  Okay, I say.

  “Mother’s sister was living in Germany and she invited Mother for a visit. Something she’d always been meaning to do. Of course, Mother can’t speak German, she’d never even been abroad, but having been an English teacher for so long she’d had that overseas bee in her bonnet. It’d been ages since she’d seen my aunt. So Mother approached Father, How about taking ten days off and going to Germany, the two of us? Father’s work couldn’t allow it, and Mother ended up going alone.”

  “That’s when your father asked for the lederhosen, I take it?”

  “Right,” she says. “Mother asked what he wanted her to bring back, and Father said lederhosen.”

  “Okay so far.”

  Her parents were reasonably close. They didn’t argue until all hours of the night; her father didn’t storm out of the house and not come home for days on end. At least not then, though apparently there had been rows more than once over him and other women.

  “Not a bad man, a hard worker, but kind of a skirt chaser,” she tosses off matter-of-factly. No relation of hers, the way she’s talking. For a second, I almost think her father is deceased. But no, I’m told, he’s alive and well.

  “Father was already up there in years, and by then those troubles were all behind them. They seemed to be getting along just fine.”

  Things, however, didn’t go without incident. Her mother extended the ten days in Germany to nearly a month and a half, with hardly a word back to Tokyo, and when she finally did return to Japan she stayed with another sister of hers in Osaka. She never did come back home.

  Neither she—the daughter—nor her father could understand what was going on. Until then, when there’d been marital difficulties, her mother had always been the pat
ient one—so ploddingly patient, in fact, that she sometimes wondered if the woman had no imagination; family always came first, and the mother was selflessly devoted to her daughter. So when the mother didn’t come around, didn’t even make the effort to call, it was beyond their comprehension. They made phone calls to the aunt’s house in Osaka, repeatedly, but they could hardly get her to come to the phone, much less admit what her intentions were.

  In mid-September, two months after returning to Japan, her mother made her intentions known. One day, out of the blue, she called home and told her husband, “You will be receiving the necessary papers for divorce. Please sign, seal, and send back to me.” Would she care to explain, her husband asked, what was the reason? “I’ve lost all love for you—in any way, shape, or form.” Oh? said her husband. Was there no room for discussion? “Sorry, none, absolutely none.”

  Telephone negotiations dragged on for the next two or three months, but her mother did not back down an inch, and finally her father consented to the divorce. He was in no position to force the issue, his own track record being what it was, and anyway, he always tended to give in.

  “All this came as a big shock,” she tells me. “But it wasn’t just the divorce. I’d imagined my parents splitting up many times, so I was already prepared for it psychologically. If the two of them had just plain divorced without all that funny business, I wouldn’t have gotten so upset. The problem wasn’t Mother dumping Father; Mother was dumping me, too. That’s what hurt.”

  I nod.

  “Up to that point, I’d always taken Mother’s side, and Mother would always stand by me. And yet here was Mother throwing me out with Father, like so much garbage, and not a word of explanation. It hit me so hard, I wasn’t able to forgive Mother for the longest time. I wrote her who knows how many letters asking her to set things straight, but she never answered my questions, never even said she wanted to see me.”