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Loading... After the Quake (2000)by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin (Translator)
  tauruseducation | Jun 7, 2013 |  Six stories, all relating to an earthquake in one way or another. It's an interesting way to tie a collection together and the stories work well together, although they cover a wide range of subjects. (  ) anneearney | Mar 31, 2013 | have ebook version velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 | Favourites so far are "Honey Pie" and "All God's Children Can Dance". Read "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" ages ago, so I might have forgotten some. Also, my copy is apparently missing one of the stories :( Update: Finally got an actual copy, yay! Loved the story I had not read before, and the one that was oddly cut off. I hope Murakami publishes until he dies, and somehow even after then. One could probably download e-books from heaven. ( ) laurelei | Mar 31, 2013 | A book with an oddly prescient title after recent events. Murakami is not up to form here - the stories here just seem flat and ordinary. Murakami can pull off 'ordinary' stories fairly well (see Norwegian Wood) but many of these were just lackluster. Most of the stories are kind of forgettable (I can barely recall any details about them, merely hours after I read the book), and the only one which stands out is the charming and wonderful story about the giant frog. That one alone redeems the entire collection. (  ) HadriantheBlind | Mar 30, 2013 |
 I loved this book before last week’s earthquake, because it illuminated a few things about my own condition at the time that I read it. But now the truth in this collection of fiction has a new depth to it; its general conclusions have become amazingly relevant and important to us this week. It offers no solutions and I don’t even think it offers much comfort, but it holds a hauntingly accurate mirror to our world now.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0375713271, Paperback)Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West's favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in After the Quake are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of Jules and Jim. There's a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." With language that's never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There's no turning back for his people; there's only before and after the quake. --Claire Dederer(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:56:49 -0500) A collection of stories inspired by the January 1995 Kobe earthquake and the poison gas subway attacks two months later takes place between the two disasters and follows the experiences of people who found their normal lives undone by surreal events. |
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