Each of the stories in the collection has a different narrator. They vary in age, gender, and educational or professional background, but they also share some important similarities. Most of them are relatively young, in either their late twenties or early thirties (nearly all of the stories contain explicit references to the narrator’s age). The narrators also tend to wrestle with issues of Existential Anxiety in the Modern World, solitude, and questions about the nature of Perception Versus Reality.

Many of the narrators share an existential uncertainty about their place in life—a theme that ties the stories together. The narrator of the first story of the collection, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” feels as though “somewhere, in [his] head, in [his] body, in [his] very existence, it’s as if there were some long-lost subterranean element that’s been skewing [his] life ever so slightly off” (14), while the narrator of the last story of the collection, “The Elephant Vanishes,” expresses a very similar feeling “that things around [him] have lost their proper balance, though it could be that [his] perceptions are playing tricks on [him]” (327).

Other narrators seem to have a more fundamental dissatisfaction with their existence.