The Elephant Vanishes

"The Elephant Vanishes shows you the world out of which manga and anime come, which is a very modern, very industrialized, very urban world. I see manga and anime as being a safety valve for the real world, or an alternative reality to the mundane world. Murakami is writer who creates wonderful visions the stranger aspects of our mundane world. Some people call him a magical realist; Murakami has our normal world being invaded by, by strange things. And his characters are very real, you could certainly see them enjoying an anime. “I see manga and anime as being a safety valve for the real world, or an alternative reality to the mundane world” Like Miyazaki, Murakami features very strong women. One thing I like about Japan is that, while on the one hand it has a very strong patriarchal culture, at the same time (at least in its fiction) it foregrounds empowered women. One of my favorite stories in The Elephant Vanishes collection is called “Sleep,” in which a woman who’s leading a very dull life with a nice dentist husband and son stops sleeping. She stays up drinking brandy, eating chocolate and reading nineteenth-century Russian novels. One other thing Murakami has in common with manga and particularly with Miyazaki is a fascination with vanishing women. Many of characters in his novels and his short stories are searching for a woman who they glimpsed once or knew for a while. Many modern manga have similar tropes. One very popular anime, Serial Experiments Lain , is about a girl who may or may not be a technological construct. Certainly we see this is Miyazaki’s work. It all goes back to an old, old folkloric story about a woman who turns into a bird vanishes. So you see how all these cultural forms are linked to traditional forms of culture. It’s a great transition. I’m a great admirer of Takashi Murakami’s work, which is very in line with the manga tradition. His creations are often directly inspired by the manga world The melancholy visual style and apocalyptic settings of many manga and anime , especially Miyazaki, are very related to World War Two and particularly the atomic bombing of Japan. Takashi Murakami’s work is even more directly linked to the traumas of World War Two . In 2005, he put on an exhibit of pop art at the Japan Society in New York that was called “Little Boy,” which of course refers to the code name for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. What the art of Takashi Murakami and anime have in common is the ability to immerse an audience in apocalyptic scenarios without triggering those audiences to turn off. Pop art and pop culture provide a catharsis and a means of coping with end-of-world scenarios, which were once too real for the Japanese."