After the Quake: Stories

My first foray into Murakami. This young Japanese writer is held in high regard by many whose opinion I value. I'm so glad I picked up this lovely collection of six short stories. Published in 2002, each tale connects in some way to the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake. Of varying lengths, each is quite different and unique in voice, plotting and perspective. We have an abandoned husband in "UFO in Koshiro", a love triangle in "Honey Pie", a businesswoman on vacation in "Thailand", a giant talking amphibian in "Super Frog Saves Tokyo", an odd trio dancing to a beachfront bonfire in "Landscape with Flatiron", and a young man whose mother is convinced he is the Son of God in "All God's Children Can Dance."

This is not my typical show more reading fare. I lack the vocabulary to properly describe it. Many call Murakami's style magical realism. I simply found each story to be eerie and mystical. Perfect renditions of characters feeling at loss and searching for ... what? Peace? Resolution? Answers? I was haunted by the lyrical writing. One of my favorites books this year thus far. Mine was an audiobook edition. The three narrators were wonderful. Completely engrossed. show less

This remarkable collection includes six stories, each of which occurs in the wake of the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake and each of which takes part of its context and meaning from the psychological reverberations of that quake. Deceptively quick to read, the stories are multilayered and generously peppered with allusion, metaphor, and an eerie sort of magical realism. Murakami's characters are palpable and true; their passions and their flaws are easy to believe. Each story can be read as just that: a story. But each one also holds hidden kernels of philosophical (metaphysical, existential -- he won't be tied down) wisdom. I finished each story with that satisfying mental check, often translated as "huh," which means I want to read show more it again and see if I can more fully ascertain the author's rich exploration of the themes of death, loss, connection, and the questionable sense of reality that comes with being human. Did I mention that Murakami has a delightfully sly sense of humor? show less

The 4th Murakami book I've read - the stories are very short (the entire book is only 144 pages), but each resonates with loss and emptiness. The amazing thing is how Murakami manages to make that loss felt in completely different ways in each story, while making them all relate to one another in a larger sense. The two best stories bookend the collection. Opener "UFO in Kashuro" shows a man perhaps disvoering too late that the emptiness he has iside was once occupied by something, but that something may have been tricked away from him. The closer "Honey Pie" is great - a love triangle of sort thats lasts for years as only Murakami can describe, complete with stories of bears the power to rewrite your own fate. Every character is show more immediately realized as a "Murakami Man," meaning his characters are imediately identifiable with his writing. Great short read. show less

Each of the stories in this collection is set one month after the devastating 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. That alone is the tie that binds and even then it is loosely bound. The earthquake is peripheral to each story at best and yet there is something decidedly central about its occurance. These stories feel like the ripples on a lake into which the earthquake has been thrown.

For me, Murakami's genius lies in his ability to craft such distinct and powerful characters. He tells profound truths through simple storytelling and earnest protagonists. The value of life, the importance of connecting with other human beings, the intense psychic power that disaster and trauma bring about in humans is delicately and beautifully explored in show more this short collection. show less

It's a weird moment when a middle-aged debt collector visited by a giant frog who tells him they need to save Tokyo from an earthquake is the most relatable character in a book? These short surreal stories feel more real than most fiction - despite the bizarre elements, the emotional atmosphere is so accurate to life that somehow the hanging plot-threads of every single story somehow don't matter? Even if we don't know how things are going to work out for the characters, the psychological portraits are, for the most part, so skilfully drawn that we don't need to know, which is the best part of Murakami's work in general and this book in particular.

When I am really impressed with a fiction writer, I often endeavor to read all or most of their works. Alas, William Faulkner was too dense and too prolific for me to succeed, but if I live long enough I may crack that nut. I had better luck with Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy. I’m almost there with Haruki Murakami, who has quite the long catalog.
The problem with reviewing the same author of multiple works is that it is sometimes difficult to find new ground to cover. My latest Murakami read was After the Quake, a collection of six short stories – or are these long stories? – centered around the cataclysmic Kobe earthquake in 1995. Except they are not. The characters in these six stories, all show more narrated from the third person, do not actually experience the earthquake directly, but are made aware of it peripherally, primarily through television news. Still, the event clearly unsettles them all and it is a pronounced sense of resonating palpable unease that binds these tales into a coherent collection. Another natural adhesive is the fact that these stories were all written in 1999-2000, so we have a snapshot of the kind of writer Murakami was during this phase of his career as well as a logical rationale for including these in a single collection. That image is sharpened because we also know by the author’s own words that he never writes short stories and novels at the same time: he either works on one or another.
Murakami has had a long writing career that dates back to 1979, which has seen a marked evolution in style and presentation while retaining some elements present at the creation, so to speak. After the Quake originally appeared in Japanese in 2000 (and in English translation in 2002), which for Murakami fans means the time between the novels Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) and Kafka on the Shore (2002). I have read two of his other short story collections – The Elephant Vanishes and Blind Willow, Sleeping Women – which together contain a medley of forty-one stories written over the long period of 1980-2005 that are neither arranged chronologically nor thematically. Like a carelessly arranged anthology album of a rock band that has been performing in various iterations since the 1960s, there is the potential for a kind of dissonance in this kind of jumble, even if the quality of the tracks are impressive. (Side note: no such dissonance in Hemingway or Faulkner, for instance, because their respective writing styles and thematic approach remained so similar over time.) Because After the Quake was written in the same era and orbit (however peripherally) around a central event, there is a logic that enhances the ability of the review process to effectively compare and contrast the contents. At the same time, it should be underscored, each of these stories can stand on its own and does not need to appear in a volume with the others in order to succeed.
“UFO in Kushiro,” opens the collection and makes reference to the earthquake more frequently and in more detail than the others. Here it serves as a tectonic shift (pun fully intended!) of sorts for Komura – one of those dull, passive Murakami male protagonists – whose wife walks out on him while he is at work five days after the earthquake with no notice, little explanation and an irrevocable determination to never return, in circumstances similar to that in the earlier novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Komura’s sudden divorce makes for a series of unlikely events to follow for him that include smuggling an unnamed object, cavorting with a couple of edgy young women, a funny story about a bear and a bell, sexual dysfunction and existentialism. Not bad for twenty pages of text! I cannot be certain what the story means, but I enjoyed it enough to read it twice through.
“Landscape with Flatiron,” perhaps the finest story in the collection, is also manifestly existential, involving a young woman’s platonic bond (but perhaps that could change …) with an older man who collects driftwood to build masterful fires on the beach that she is powerfully drawn to for emotional succor. This is an especially rich tale pregnant with metaphor that is enhanced by Murakami’s gift for crafting female characters who often are far more developed and complex than their male counterparts. “All God’s Children Can Dance” is a strange, disquieting tale of religion, the potential for incest, the prospect of virgin birth, an unusually large penis, and a man with a missing earlobe that has been bitten off by a dog – in a strange contrast to the author’s typical use of a woman’s ear as an object of sexual fetish. It is as if Japanese literary doppelgangers of Stephen King, Rod Serling, John Irving and Edgar Allen Poe got together for a weird collaboration. I’m not sure how I feel about the story, but it is by all means worth the read.
Of the remaining stories, I very much enjoyed both “Thailand” – which contains familiar Murakami elements of jazz music and a hint of magical realism – as well as the quirky love story “Honey Pie.” I was less impressed with “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” an attempt at magical whimsy that seemed to me to fall flat whether intended as an allegory, a comedy or a psychodrama. But perhaps I just missed something.
Whether you are a diehard Murakami fan or simply curious about an author who gets a lot of press in the literary world, I would recommend this slender volume for your reading pleasure. show less

Murakami's stories are masterful, as playful as they are believable. Where magical realism slips int, particularly in "Super-Frog saves Tokyo", there's also an element of adult-type wonder that isn't easy to find with other authors. It makes Murakami's work all the more special and memorable.

And though these are short stories, none particularly long, it's not difficult to get sucked in to each world. Much as the themes might overlap, the characters are as various as the plots, and nothing here is repetitive. Simply enough, you'll be hard-pressed to not read this short collection in one sitting.

Absolutely recommended.