The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

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“A Slow Boat to China”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“A Slow Boat to China” Summary

The narrator reflects on various encounters he’s had with Chinese people. He focuses in particular on three encounters, beginning with the first time he saw a Chinese person in 1959 or 1960 (he begins a trip to the local library to confirm the exact year but decides that this detail does not matter and goes home). As a child, he needs to go to a Chinese elementary school to complete a standardized aptitude test. The proctor is a man from China who teaches at the school. In the narrator’s memory, the proctor asks the test takers to be respectful of the school and not vandalize the desks they were using, after which he tells them all to be proud.

Years later, when he is 19 and studying in Tokyo, the narrator meets a Chinese girl his age. The two of them work at a publishing warehouse. After their last day, the girl—ethnically Chinese though born in Japan—agrees to accompany the narrator to a discotheque. They both enjoy themselves, but at the end of the night, the narrator accidentally directs the girl to the wrong train. Realizing his mistake, he takes the next train and meets her at the last station. He apologizes for his mistake, and the girl reveals her own insecurities. The narrator promises to call the girl the following day. He soon realizes, however, that he has accidentally thrown out the matchbook on which he wrote her number. He tries to reacquire her number in a few ways but has no luck. He never sees the girl again.

The man’s third encounter with a Chinese person occurs when he is 28. He runs into a former classmate from his childhood at a coffee shop in Aoyama, and is initially unable to recall the classmate, but after the two talk for a while, the classmate tells him that he now sells encyclopedias to Chinese people living in Tokyo. He gives his business card to the narrator and the two part ways.

“A Slow Boat to China” Analysis

This story explores memory and its connection to social relationships and the nature of reality. Why the narrator is so compelled to uncover his early experiences with Chinese people—like an “archaeologist […] sifting through the tell of my own past” (218)—is never made clear. The narrator himself is torn between an impulse to record events from his past as meticulously and accurately as possible and a more laissez-faire impulse to “let [his] memories be free of dates” (219). The tension between these two impulses is highlighted from the beginning of the story, in which the narrator bikes to the library to consult newsreels from 1959 and 1960 in order to determine the exact date he met his “first Chinese,” only to return home after the sight of some chickens pecking at their food leads him to decide that such antiquarian details are ultimately unimportant.

In reconstructing his own past, the narrator is plagued by the limitations of his memory, which he recognizes as “a damn sight short of total” (219). Why do we remember some things and forget others? This is a question that clearly preoccupies the narrator, whose experiences with Chinese people convey a certain set of impressions on the often-fleeting nature of social connections. But the very subject of memory is also evoked in the narrator’s memory of his experiences with Chinese people, with a Chinese acquaintance from his school days remarking that “[m]emory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal” (234).

To the narrator, China represents remoteness, both literally and psychologically. China, observes the narrator, “is so far away” (239). He remembers that the Chinese elementary school where he met the Chinese proctor felt particularly distant, like the edge of the world. The Chinese girl the narrator meets becomes inaccessible to him when he loses her number. As for the narrator’s Chinese school acquaintance, the narrator cannot even remember his name. The narrator’s experiences with Chinese people, as he reflects, are unique to him, providing lessons about respecting others, pride, missed connections, and identity. The narrator thus has his own China, a China “that sends messages just to me” (238), a China that is “a part of myself that’s been cut off by the word China” (239).

At the end of the story, the narrator even thinks of his individual China, in psychiatric terms, as a kind of “misdiagnosis” (239). Just like his memories, then, the narrator’s version of China and his experiences with Chinese people might have nothing to do with reality, might reflect only his personality and perceptions, might be a misdiagnosis: “But what am I, what are you, if not a misdiagnosis? And if so, is there a way out?” (239).