That pretty much sums up how I felt about a lot of the stories in this book - like I was off-kilter and not sure if what I was listening to was really happening. None of which were ever referenced again, so that when my teacher asked us in class about the paint factory part of the book, we were all like, 'WHOA, that really happened?!' It reminded me a lot of The Invisible Man, particularly the part in which the narrator worked at a paint factory and then underwent crazy treatments.

And then it's gone and you return to normalcy and you are not quite sure if what you heard really happened or was some bizarre dream-memory in your mind. You'd be in a story with someone who appears totally normal, making spaghetti or drinking a beer or listening to classical music, and then BAM! you're introduced to some little green monster or a dancing elf or a man who works in a vanishing elephant. But listening to Murakami's short story collection The Elephant Vanishes while driving to and from work was an absolutely surreal experience. Why didn't I realize that Haruki Murakami was so quirky? Now that I look at the book summaries of many of his books, I see that quirkiness (or some synonym of that word) shows up in every single description.

The dancing dwarf murakami pdf