When a man´s favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple´s midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald´s; a woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden, an insomniac wife wakes up to a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible -even death. In every one of the stories that make up THE ELEPHANT VANISHES, Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal. He has a deadpan genius for dislocating realities to uncover the surreal in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.