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After the Quake: Stories

Review

After the Quake: Stories

There's nothing tidy or organized about an earthquake, no real signal that marks its absolute end. Earthquakes can echo for days, the repercussions shaking all those poor souls who thought they were safe.

These six stories by Haruki Murakami, Japan's most popular living fiction writer, work in much the same way. Beneath their crystalline surfaces, subterranean changes of tremendous import are occurring. Rather than wrapping up with a tidy conclusion, the stories disintegrate beautifully, leaving readers shaken long after they turn the last page.

The stories are inspired by the quake that devastated Kobe in January 1995. The earthquake itself only appears at the edges of each tale, but Murakami's characters all face sudden, uncontrollable changes in their lives wrought by external forces. In effect, each of them is struck by his or her own shattering personal earthquake.

In "UFO in Kushiro," an electronics salesman is stunned when his wife, after watching TV news reports of the quake nonstop for five days, abandons him ("living with you is like living with a chunk of air," she writes). A colleague intervenes and sets him on a journey that turns out to be much longer and stranger than expected. In "Landscape with Flatiron," a runaway girl finds first comfort, then despair, in a bonfire artist on the beach. "All God's Children Can Dance" is a stunning internal safari through the dangerous emotional landscape of a fatherless young man with a terrible hangover. In "Thailand," an exhausted pathologist is softened and broken by the revelation that comes at the end of her week's vacation. "Honey Pie" is a meditation on love as sweet as its title, but its sweetness is tempered by nightmares and grief.

"Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" is the strangest of the stories, and the most closely tied to the Kobe quake. A loan collector, Mr. Katagiri, comes home to find a six-foot frog in his apartment. Naturally, he's a little surprised, although he remains typically polite: "It's not that I don't trust you, but I don't seem to be able to grasp the situation exactly." The frog explains that he needs Katagiri's help to fight the giant Worm underneath Tokyo and prevent an earthquake even bigger than Kobe's. The story, which begins as a fun romp through absurdity, becomes a dark, even nauseating tale of a fierce battle that takes place both literally and metaphorically beneath the surface.

The protagonist of "Honey Pie," a struggling fiction writer called Junpei, declares in a melancholy moment that "the short story is on the way out. Like the slide rule." Reading this collection filled with undeniable passion, intensely fascinating characters, and sparkling prose ("Time wobbled on its axis inside him, like curtains stirring in a breeze"), one can't help but think --- and hope --- Junpei is wrong.

Reviewed by Becky Ohlsen (becky_ohlsen@yahoo.com) on January 20, 2011

After the Quake: Stories
by Haruki Murakami

  • Publication Date: May 13, 2003
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 0375713271
  • ISBN-13: 9780375713279