One of the only constants in everyday life is sleep. Your day is quite literally defined as between the time you wake up and the time you return to this altered state of consciousness. In this way, sleep is inseparable from routine. From the beginning of “Sleep” in The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami establishes a relationship between the ideas of sleep and routine, using the concept of sleep as a tool to explore the idea of liberating oneself from routine.

Murakami immediately creates an association between the concepts of sleep and routine, using the narrator’s life before and after her loss of sleep. Though Murakami doesn’t give her a name, he does bestow her with the familiar archetype of a housewife. Murakami only provides two other main characters, her husband and her son, because her purpose is to serve the men around her. While reading Anna Karenina during one of her sleepless nights, the narrator attempts to motivate herself to return to regular life by reminding herself of her duties: “I’m a wife. A mother. I have responsibilities. I have to make my husband’s lunches and take care of my son” (Murakami 88). This normality of her prior life is established through a rigid routine, with each day being described as “pretty much a repetition of the one before” (Murakami 81). The most poignant part of her routine is the morning, when she says her farewells to her husband and son as they go to work and school. She notes the eerie constancy of the habit, remarking that it is “as if they’d been trained by a choreographer” (Murakami 78).

Murakami doesn’t just focus on the narrator’s immediate past; he also provides her with a backstory. By exploring more than just her simple relationships, he provides depth to the character beyond the ideas she presents—a rare occurrence in Murakami’s stories. We learn in the first paragraphs of the story that she was a student and went to college (Murakami 74), implying that she, at some point, had aspirations beyond being a housewife. She views her life as a student to be a time where she had control over her direction, and Murakami introduces books as a symbol to represent this self-determination. She abandons the habit when she becomes a wife and mother: “Without noticing it, I had become accustomed in this way to a life without books. … Reading had been the center of my life when I was young” (Murakami 87). She reminisces about these old times, “Where had the old me gone, the one who used to read a book as if possessed by it? What had those days—and that almost abnormally intense passion—meant to me?” (Murakami 88). This brings us to the present: the return of this passion.

Murakami presents books in a variety of different lights: simultaneously as an escape from the routine that constricts her and as a direction of her routine towards a deep passion. Murakami specifically focuses on Anna Karenina: the novel that the narrator is first, and possibly most deeply, infatuated with reading. On one hand, the narrator is met with an unsettling feeling, caused by the breaking of routine—the breaking of conventional book structure. She comments, “I couldn’t help thinking what an odd novel this was. You don’t see the heroine, Anna, until Chapter 18” (Murakami 88). Through this detail, the novel also encapsulates the mythos of reading: relaxing, an escape from routine. She speculates, “Maybe people in those days had lots of time to kill—at least the part of society that read novels” (Murakami 88). On the other hand, the narrator is comfortable due to her routine remaining. She admits to the audience that although she has been granted freedom due to her lack of sleep, she still “went through the motions—shopping, cooking, playing with my son, having sex with my husband” (Murakami 95–96). But perhaps more importantly, she identifies her new nighttime endeavors, which supposedly are free to her, as her “nightly routine” (Murakami 95). This is strange considering the narrator frequently refers to her current situation as a time with grand changes, of which only she is aware, while routine is static by definition. The narrator marks her husband and son as asleep to this new world, both literally and metaphorically: “They believed that the world was as it had always been, unchanging. But they were wrong. It was changing in ways they could never guess” (Murakami 102).

In the second half of the story, Murakami introduces the concept of agency, which works to complete his theory of routine. Agency acts as the antidote for routine, which has previously constricted the narrator. When she delves into the depths of the library to understand the purposes of sleep, one book leads her to the conclusion that sleep was acting as the bars that kept her locked in the jail cell of her routine. She reflects, “I was being consumed by my tendencies and then sleeping to repair the damage. My life was nothing but a repetition of this cycle. It was going nowhere” (Murakami 99). So she decides that in order to escape the cell, she would have to commit to not sleep—this action comprises her agency. And it is true that the narrator reevaluates her routine while not sleeping. She stops keeping a diary, reflecting her shift to live in the present moment rather than through a predetermined routine, due to her newfound agency (Murakami 82). Murakami affirms that the narrator’s control and mindfulness brings her happiness and meaning; the narrator declares: “I was expanding my life, and it was wonderful… Here I was—alive, and I could feel it. It was real” (Murakami 100). However, he also seems to imply that the narrator at some point got carried away, that she went beyond reevaluating and reworking her routine—she attempted to reach a level of control that the universe had to counteract. The peculiar and disconnected ending to the story, the attack by the night men, makes sense as a divine response to balance her newfound agency. The event appears to be completely out of her control—and, in her sleepless world, it is—but it’s worth noting that if the narrator had slept, she would have avoided that event. Sleep and routine can be seen as a prison, but Murakami attempts to show the audience that sleep and routine also acts as a wall that shields from the realm of the unexpected.

In his short story “Sleep”, Haruki Murakami uses the concept of sleep as a tool to explore the idea of liberating oneself from routine. Murakami provides conflicting information, but he tends to paint a picture of sleep as a jail cell: a constant that keeps an individual continuing on harmful habits, figuratively asleep to the realities of their life. And as the narrator learns, the act of taking control of your destiny may free you from your negative yet unquestioned habits, but it comes at a price: you may have real fulfillment, but you may also have real pain.