The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

The narrator of “Sleep” is one of the few female narrators of Murakami’s short story collection, as well as the only narrator whose story culminates in her violent attack and presumed death, which contributes to the overall lens through which Murakami views his female characters. Before she stops sleeping, the narrator admits, she feels a little bored with the repetitiveness of her life, maintaining her home and caring for her husband and young son. She comes to view her sleeplessness positively, as an expansion of her life. Significantly, however, this expansion is marked by the absence of her family—her husband and son—suggesting that she is only able to live fully as herself when separate from them. Indeed, the narrator never tells her husband and son that she has stopped sleeping (and they themselves, as she notes not without some surprise, do not notice). By giving up sleeping, the woman finds she is able to live more spontaneously and in the present, saying, “Reality and I exist simultaneously at the present moment. That’s the most important thing” (82).

The parallels Murakami draws between the woman’s life and that of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (the novel the woman reads and re-reads during her many wakeful nights) foreshadow a tragic end to the self-reclamation and sense of freedom the woman finds in her sleeplessness. Murakami views both the narrator and Anna as vain about their appearances. Like Anna, the woman is educated and a lover of books, and has a husband and son about whom she feels ambivalent. The narrator explains that she does not find her husband attractive, and says she’s “fond of him, of course […] But strictly speaking, [she doesn’t] actually like him” (78). Her attitude toward her son is similar since, throughout the story, the narrator reflects on his similarities to her husband—similarities that do not make her happy. Like Anna Karenina, the woman feels lonely—an outsider in her own home—but unlike Anna, she has no Count Vronsky in whom to invest her passion and desire. The woman’s realization at the end of the story that her husband and her son have the same face drives the woman out of her house on her 17th sleepless night—a decision that Murakami’s structure positions as analogous to Anna Karenina’s suicide—culminating in the woman’s attack and presumed death.