Murakami’s Short Stories: The Chocolate Between the Pages
Contains spoilers, including the ending of “Sleep.”
The detail I remember most clearly from Murakami’s short fiction is a few flakes of chocolate between the pages of Anna Karenina. A woman finds them while rereading a book she has almost entirely forgotten. I disliked no collection in particular, but none held my attention as his novels did. “Sleep,” from The Elephant Vanishes, is the story that stayed with me. The woman herself wonders what becomes of the hours spent reading when so little of a book remains.
Reading with chocolate
The woman has stopped sleeping. Seventeen days into this extraordinary condition, she reports no exhaustion. Her husband is a dentist; they have a son, and the household continues to function. She already had time to read during the day, though thoughts of shopping, meals, and family used to interrupt her attention. Sleeplessness gives her long stretches in which she can follow a book without being pulled away from it.
When she takes up Anna Karenina, remembered fragments give her very little help. She knows she read it in high school and assumes it moved her deeply. Now whole scenes appear unfamiliar. Murakami lets her worry about that expenditure of time, then interrupts the reflection with something the old reading has physically left behind: “a few crumbling flakes of chocolate stuck between the pages.”
There is no recovered high-school scene, no detailed recollection of the room or the girl she was. The flakes provoke an appetite. She remembers that she used to eat while reading and realizes she has not touched chocolate since getting married. Her husband dislikes her eating sweets; they rarely keep them at home. She puts on a cardigan, goes downstairs, buys two bars, opens one outside the shop, and continues eating on the way back and in the elevator. At the sofa, chocolate and Tolstoy come together again.
The passage spends its time on the journey from an old habit to a present pleasure. Each stage gives the appetite another place to persist. She does not have to recover her first understanding of Anna Karenina, or even establish what that understanding amounted to. She can buy chocolate and read the novel now. Murakami gives this modest renewal enough duration for us to accompany it, then changes the pace with a glance at her watch: eleven-forty.
Her husband will be home for lunch. The next sequence is equally practical: water, noodles, seaweed, tofu. She brushes her teeth to remove the chocolate smell. The book has kept traces of this pleasure for more than a decade; in the apartment, its fresh trace must disappear within minutes. That difference is enacted through two ordinary uses of the body—eating and brushing—before anyone has asked her what she has been doing. The speed of her precaution tells us how readily she anticipates the household’s preferences.
Lunch puts two kinds of attention at the same table. Her husband discusses a machine for removing plaque; she is occupied by Vronsky falling from his horse. He wants her opinion on an expensive purchase, and she supplies a workable answer while remaining elsewhere. Later, he sits beside Anna Karenina without noticing it. The book is plainly available to be seen. Murakami can therefore show her growing separation without staging a discovery, a confrontation, or an explicit prohibition against reading. The meal goes well enough. What has changed in her passes through it almost undetected.
A wardrobe for a replacement
The possibility of doing something again helps distinguish the objects in these collections. In “Tony Takitani,” from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, clothes remain perfectly wearable after the woman who owned them has died. Her husband tries to make that usability serve his grief.
Tony advertises for an assistant with his wife’s measurements. The job comes with a peculiar uniform: the successful applicant must wear the dead woman’s clothes. He hopes to become accustomed to her absence through the repeated sight of someone else wearing them. Measurements and employment terms give the proposal an unsettling practicality. The applicant needs to fit the garments and perform the work; nothing in the arrangement could reproduce the marriage.
When a young woman tries them on, their abundance and luxury make her cry. Tony cannot understand her response. The scene has produced an emotion his specifications never accounted for, belonging to a person whose experience of the clothes differs from his wife’s and his own.
He cancels the arrangement and eventually sells the clothes. Yet the story’s attention follows the applicant’s tears after the wardrobe has gone. His memories of his wife grow less distinct, while the crying stranger returns to him against his wishes. Murakami redirects recollection toward the brief encounter generated by Tony’s attempt to manage it. The proposed substitute has acquired a place in his memory that he never intended to give her.
The racket and the poems
A usable possession can also make an old activity harder to resume. Near the end of “An Independent Organ,” in Men Without Women, the narrator receives a squash racket belonging to Dr. Tokai, a man with whom he used to play. Tokai died after starving himself in the aftermath of an affair. The racket, ordered before his death, is unused.
The narrator still plays squash, but he seldom uses the gift because it feels too light. Its lightness recalls Tokai’s wasted body. Murakami attaches the recollection to the very property that matters when choosing a racket: how it feels in the hand. Using it would repeatedly bring a dying body into an activity once shared with a living friend. The concluding explanation makes the association explicit, leaving less for the reader to discover than the hurried toothbrushing in “Sleep.” It also identifies an exact impediment. The game can continue; this particular racket makes continuing painful.
“On a Stone Pillow,” in First Person Singular, gives rereading a more durable place. An older narrator has kept a handmade book of poems sent by a woman with whom he spent a night when he was young. He cannot reliably recover her name or face. Her words remain available: he takes out the book and reads it again, sometimes aloud.
The quoted poems interrupt his retrospective account with language she composed herself. His recollection keeps returning to her body, but her writing gives the encounter another form in which to survive. As in “Sleep,” he can read again, though the poems tell him nothing of their author’s later life. He does not know whether she is alive. The little book lets him hear her words while the story leaves the rest of her life beyond his account.
Trying to tell the elephant story
In “The Elephant Vanishes,” a surviving image creates trouble when the narrator tries to tell another person about it.
An elephant and its keeper disappear from a town enclosure. The account begins with the apparatus of an investigation: newspaper reports, keys, a shackle found still locked, the absence of tracks. The narrator preserves clippings. These details give the disappearance a dense public record without furnishing a usable explanation.
Later, over drinks with a woman he has met through work, he attempts to describe his last private glimpse of elephant and keeper. Their relative sizes seemed to have changed. He qualifies the observation, uncertain how much either figure had grown or diminished. The precision now concerns the limits of what he can claim. Unlike the newspaper material, this image has no independent witness he can cite.
Their conversation stalls around his difficulty. Murakami has made the narrator professionally fluent: he can promote kitchen appliances with a polished speech about unity. Faced with a woman he might want to know, however, he cannot make his most important recent experience intelligible. The shift from civic reporting to a hesitant conversation gives the same disappearance a second consequence.
The woman’s brick-red umbrella is returned, business contact continues, and he makes no further personal approach. Those small completed transactions keep ordinary competence visible around the failure. The retained image cannot be converted into an account that brings him closer to someone else. Explaining whether the elephant shrank would leave this failure of speech largely untouched.
There is room for a more hopeful use of storytelling in after the quake. Its six linked stories gather around the Kobe earthquake, giving the collection a shared disturbance. In “Honey Pie,” Junpei revises a story about two bears so that they can work together making and selling honey pies, rescuing one from life in a zoo. As he keeps watch over Sayoko and her sleeping daughter, he plans to ask Sayoko to marry him. The revised tale accompanies a decision to enter their life more fully. The story ends before that decision is tested.
The reading goes on
“Sleep” gives its narrator a peculiar sustained experience of renewal. She reads Anna Karenina three times. Repetition yields further discoveries, and she describes a growing confidence in her understanding. The old flakes began a sequence that extends well beyond a single remembered pleasure. She has become absorbed in a demanding activity she can keep doing.
That duration gives the later estrangement force. Memories from before the sleeplessness begin to feel remote. The woman who resumes reading is also becoming separated from the life in which she first read. Her account of exceptional clarity grows harder to accept without reservation as that separation increases.
At the harbor, men begin rocking her Civic. The car, whose unreliability was established earlier, refuses to start. She drops the key and cannot retrieve it. After so many pages in which she has arranged household tasks around her private attention, the narrative contracts to actions she cannot complete. The ending leaves her trapped and afraid. Nothing establishes that her renewed pleasure deserves punishment; equally, her confidence has supplied no protection from the danger around the car.
She really did go out, buy the bars, and return to the book. The ending makes that experience precarious without retracting it. Among the clothes, racket, poems, and remembered elephant, what moves me most is the time Murakami gives her to read again. The former reader is still there to take up the novel, and for a while the story lets us stay with her as she does.
Sources
Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin, 1993. “Sleep” and “The Elephant Vanishes” translated by Jay Rubin.
Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Translated by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin, 2006. “Tony Takitani” translated by Jay Rubin.
Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women. Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, 2017. “An Independent Organ” translated by Philip Gabriel.
Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular. Translated by Philip Gabriel, 2021. “On a Stone Pillow.”
Haruki Murakami, after the quake. Translated by Jay Rubin, 2002. “Honey Pie.”
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