56 pages • 1 hour read
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”
“The Second Bakery Attack”
“The Kangaroo Communiqué”
“On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”
“Sleep”
“The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds”
“Lederhosen”
“Barn Burning”
“The Little Green Monster”
“Family Affair”
“A Window”
“TV People”
“A Slow Boat to China”
“The Dancing Dwarf”
“The Last Lawn of the Afternoon”
“The Silence”
“The Elephant Vanishes”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
The story begins with the female narrator sitting alone and looking at a lone oak tree in her garden. She remarks that she often speaks to this tree. One day, she sees an ugly little green monster burrow out from the earth near her oak tree. The woman retreats to the back room of her house in horror as the monster approaches her door, knocks, and finally breaks in. The monster finds the woman, who realizes that it can read her mind. Telepathically, the monster professes his love for the woman, saying he has come from deep within the earth to win her hand. The woman, however, rejects the monster, and uses his ability to read her mind against him: She imagines all kinds of cruel tortures for the monster, until the monster withers away and dies, turning into nothing more than a shadow.
Dense with symbolism, this story explores themes of Internality and Social Relationships as well as the nature of reality. The narrator’s confession that she often speaks to the tree evokes a sense of loneliness and solitude, but when she gets the opportunity to connect with another living thing—the little green monster—she kills him.
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By Haruki Murakami