The Elephant Vanishes (象の消滅, Zō no shōmetsu) is a collection of 17 short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

The contents of this compilation were selected by Gary Fisketjon (Murakami's editor at Knopf) and first published in an English translation in 1993 (its Japanese counterpart was released later in 2005).

The stories mesh normality with surrealism, and focus on painful issues involving loss, destruction, confusion and loneliness.

After being disturbed by a strange phone-call from an unknown woman demanding ten minutes of his time, a man goes in search of his wife's missing cat and meets a girl in a neighbor's garden.

A recently married couple in their late twenties lie in bed, famished; they have little in their refrigerator: a six-pack of beer and some cookies.

After drinking and eating all of it, the man recounts to his wife a time he and his friend “robbed” a bakery ten years ago.

The couple then leave the restaurant and drive until they find an empty parking lot; they then eat four to six Big Macs each until they are full.

A man working in the product-control section of a department store received a letter from a woman who wrote to complain that she had mistakenly bought Mahler instead of Brahms.

She conceals her condition from her husband and children but spends the nights eating chocolate, drinking Rémy Martin brandy, reading Anna Karenina and going for drives through the city in her Civic.

A woman tells of her mother's divorce, prompted by a trip to buy some lederhosen in Germany as a souvenir for her husband who has remained at home in Tokyo.

When the sister invites Noboru over for dinner at the apartment, the men get a chance to interact with each other talking about plans after the wedding.

A graduate spends a year working at "The Pen Society" where he is employed to reply to letters from members, grading and making constructive comments on their prose.

As a nineteen-year-old college student in Tokyo, he meets a similar-aged Chinese woman during a part-time job at a publisher's warehouse; being born in Japan, she has little ties to her ethnic background.

After admitting his mistake and the woman confessing her insecurities, he says that he will call her tomorrow before she takes the next train back home.

In a subsequent dream he makes a pact with the dwarf to win the heart of a beautiful girl at the factory dance.

Proud of his work, a man decides to give up his job mowing lawns as having split up from his girlfriend he no longer needs the money.

During the final year of high school, Matsumoto, a classmate of both boys, committed suicide by jumping in front of a train.

Ozawa tells the narrator that he has an idiosyncratic admiration for people like Aoki who cunningly seize opportunity.

Contents are:[3] While the list above details which stories appeared before the publication of The Elephant Vanishes, many of the stories have also appeared elsewhere more recently: The British theatre company Complicite collaborated with Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre to produce a stage adaptation also entitled The Elephant Vanishes.

Directed by Simon McBurney and starring a Japanese cast, the play opened in May, 2003, in Tokyo before touring internationally in limited festival runs.

The show incorporated a great deal of multimedia, which Complicite had traditionally eschewed, but married it with the company's trademark communal storytelling and demanding physical performance style.

This combination of technical wizardry and compelling human narrative received high praise from critics, who also cited the play's humor, realism, and dreamlike motion, a fitting tribute to Murakami's prose.