The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

The tone of longing and melancholy that characterizes “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” evokes a sense of ennui in the narrator that underscores the story’s exploration of Perception Versus Reality and Existential Anxiety in the Modern World. The narrator himself reflects on his experience with loss and loneliness after his girlfriend breaks up with him, and even quits his job mowing lawns because he cannot think of what to do with the money. The narrator displays many of the common symptoms of depression—ostensibly due to his breakup, but the narrator himself states that he did not see his girlfriend very much: “Out of a whole year [they] could get together maybe two weeks total” (270). He admits that he does not know whether he “really and truly loved her or not” (270), suggesting that his melancholy involves a broader existential anxiety about loss and human suffering that, for the narrator, is embodied by the woman whose lawn is his final assignment at his job.

The woman, whose husband is revealed to have passed away, is clearly in emotional pain. While the narrator works, she drinks and smokes heavily. After the narrator is finished, she keeps him longer to talk to him, and even insists on showing him his daughter’s room, and presses him for his “general impressions” (287) about her. The woman’s behavior seems to reflect her loneliness and her desire for connection, as well as an attempt to self-medicate her own pain. As the narrator leaves her, he reflects that “the woman seemed to have still left something unsaid. As if she didn’t quite know how to put it” (289), pointing to the inexorable quality of pain and loss that goes hand in hand with being human.

Like the capacity for suffering and loss, the passage of time is equally inextricable from the human experience. Significantly, the narrator never explains why he tells us about the woman, or what his impressions of her were. To him, she is part of “ancient history” (268), a part of a different stage in his life—his memory of her becomes malleable and evasive, reflecting the passage of time and how it has changed him. The narrator suggests that there is a certain “absurdity” in the way people construct their reality out of unreliable memories. He observes early on that “memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory” (269), an observation that troubles the line between Perception Versus Reality.

According to the narrator, both memory and meaning are created by the individual, which leads him to find solace in moments of simple order and solitude. The narrator takes great pride and even joy in mowing lawns well. He compares the feeling of mowing a lawn to when “a thick bank of clouds has suddenly lifted, letting in the sun all around” (273)—imagery that seems to evoke the story’s deeper themes of loneliness and loss. The complex emotional and psychological issues addressed by the story are ultimately eclipsed by the simplicity of mowing lawns, the symmetry and satisfaction of which is enough to bring meaning and even happiness to the narrator. As in many of Murakami’s stories suggest, life can be very simple despite attempts to complicate it.