The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Lederhosen continues the collection’s engagement with Internality and Social Relationships and the ways they are viewed and constructed. Murakami employs a dual perspective to tell the story of the woman buying lederhosen for her husband: The first is the perspective of the woman’s daughter (a friend of the narrator’s wife), while the second perspective is that of the narrator himself. To the daughter, while her mother’s behavior is strange and, in a sense, psychologically inexplicable, she has been able to forgive her mother, precisely because of the detail of the lederhosen. As she tells the narrator, “I can’t say why it makes any difference, I certainly don’t know how to explain it, but it may have something to do with us being women” (129). To the narrator (who is not a woman), this is not much of an explanation. He seems to view things differently, suggesting that perhaps the lederhosen are not the “point” of the story at all. He even asks the woman, “Still, if you leave the lederhosen out of it, supposing it was just the story of a woman taking a trip and finding herself, would you have been able to forgive her?” (129). Significantly, the woman’s response to this question is no: If this were the case, she could not have forgiven her mother.

The dual perspective allows Murakami to contextualize the anecdote of the mother’s decision to divorce within the narrator’s internal musings about why the daughter remains unmarried, implying a presumed connection on the part of the narrator. Before even recounting the story of the lederhosen, Murakami has his narrator paint a verbal portrait of the daughter, describing her personality and focusing especially on her love life. Specifically, the married narrator wonders why the daughter is not married, observing that she is attractive and has had relationships in the past. Disagreeing with his wife’s belief that she is “just unlucky,” the narrator reflects that there is something more than luck that is at play, believing that “her heart was never set on marrying […] Marriage just doesn’t fall within the sweep of her comet, at least not entirely” (121). The narrator suggests that the daughter’s complicated feelings about her mother’s decision to divorce has had a lasting impact on her desire for a marriage of her own. For the narrator, the story of the lederhosen becomes support for his theory that the daughter is not interested in, or perhaps is suspicious of, the institution of marriage.