The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Content Warning: This short story contains suggestions of pedophilia.

The first story of the collection, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” begins with the narrator cooking pasta at home when the phone rings. The phone call is from an unknown woman who asks for 10 minutes of the narrator’s time. When she learns the narrator is cooking, she says she will call back later. After eating, the man spends the day doing chores, listening for the distinct sound of the bird he and his wife refer to as the “wind-up bird.” The man quit his job as a legal secretary recently, having become disillusioned and bored. He is unsure what he wants in life. The man’s wife calls him to ask that he look for her missing cat.

A little later, the unknown woman calls again. The man agrees to hear her out, but when she takes the conversation in an erotic direction, he hangs up on her. He goes out to search for the cat in a neighbor’s overgrown garden, where he meets a teenage girl. The girl claims that all the neighborhood cats use her family’s yard as a shortcut, and she invites the man to wait with her.