Haruki Murakami- after the quake

after the quake

Vintage

Haruki Murakami
2000
Translated by Jay Rubin

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

"Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they - earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being 'down to earth' or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid."

As well as being my favourite living author in any known universe, Haruki Murakami is a masterful short story writer. Each of his smaller pieces manages to tell a compelling and almost-always mysterious tale that somehow manages to both exist brilliantly as a purposeful self-contained story and as a window into a potentially much larger imaginary universe, a potential novel in itself that the reader can dwell on to imagine their own bigger, individual tale. Most of Murakami's short stories were originally published in a few different sources and then collected into novel-sized collections (namely The Elephant Vanishes and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which I'll probably end up reviewing here one day), and as enjoyable as they are their compiled nature means the stories generally aren't connected within their own topics and themes. after the quake contains a bunch of short stories that were written and published exclusively in this book. Essentially, it's a Murakami concept album.

Awesome Super Frog cover.

Having been gestating in Murakami's mind for about five years, after the quake (lowercase intentional, by the way) addresses through the medium of short fiction the Japanese public consciousness regarding the Kobe earthquake of 1995, in which 6,400 people died. The six short stories that comprise the book all relate to it in some way, with varying degrees of specificness. It seems to me that Murakami designated the order of the stories in a particular way to give a certain effect, where the first four stories in the book hold little direct thematic relation to an earthquake, but instead exist as small emotional character pieces; stories about relationships, love, family and dreams that struck me as particularly existential, each in their own way representing an earthquake as an emotional tribulation. These stories particularly struck me as almost smaller pieces of an imaginary whole; in that I wouldn't be surprised if Murakami decided to write another four hundred pages for each one to turn it into a novel.

 The fifth story is my favourite by far, and it's almost completely insane. 'Super-Frog Saves Tokyo' tells the story of a normal guy named Katagiri, who one day finds a powerfully-built six foot tall frog in his apartment, who asks him for help in saving Tokyo from the threat of a giant earthquake, delivered by a giant worm deep beneath the city. Frog needs Katagiri to go with him underground, and help him fight worm in a battle to the death. It's ridiculous, but also funny, endearing, powerful and heart-warming, and it's probably my favourite short-story I've ever read. It's imagination at its finest, and I'd recommend after the quake on the basis of that strange fable by itself.

Running in at around 130-pages, I think after the quake would be a great introduction to the author for anyone attracted by his work. 90% of the book keeps the surrealism at a minimum, gradually introducing it in the fourth story before throwing the reader into the sheer brilliance of Super-Frog. Fans of Murakami yet to read this will probably already assume that it's essential, and they're right.