Existential anxiety colors the worlds of the short stories collected in The Elephant Vanishes, touching the lives of each narrator regardless of age or background, suggesting that the experience of such anxiety is simultaneously universal and highly individual. The narrator of “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” in particular goes through life in a kind of existential haze, noting that “[s]omewhere, in my head, in my body, in my very existence, it’s as if there were some long-lost subterranean element that’s been skewing my life ever so slightly off” (14). The narrator of “The Elephant Vanishes,” similarly, claims to feel that “things around [him] have lost their proper balance” (327) after the disappearance (or vanishing) of the elephant and his keeper.

In other stories, the dissatisfaction with existence runs deeper, as in “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” where the narrator wants only “to be able to be in two places at once” (64). Even the younger characters of Murakami’s stories are plagued by anxieties about their existence and mortality. The teenage girl the narrator meets in “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” cannot stop thinking about death, indicating that there is a fine line between anxiety and dread in a modern world where even children cannot escape the subject of death.