After the Quake

Product Information

It became a catalyst for individuals to reassess their lives with unexpected consequences for themselves and their families and friends around them. In an essay for Granta, he reflects on the quake and the gas attack: “To me, the two events weren’t separate and discrete; unravelling one might help unravel the other. 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 this short collection.

In some cases, it seemed like the characters already had toxic feelings of emptiness lying around in the background, and the quake surged them up to the surface. In this collection of six short stories the relationship of the narrative to the earthquake itself is sometimes clear but at other time obscure.None of them are likeable people, with the possible exception of Miyake from “Landscape With Flatiron. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. They then proceed to have intercourse on the living room couch and Junpei continually holds back on ejaculation, not wanting the moment to end.

Indeed, it felt as if I was wading through the rubble of their minds, and witnessing the ruptures and shaking of their emotional lives. Watching coverage of the disaster on the news was something that came up in several stories, and I can imagine how that can compound this emotion. The title After the Quake immediately suggests that these are stories relating to an earthquake when in fact these are short stories that were written after an earthquake in Japan and are very loosely related at best to the actual quake. That April, Hideo Murai, a member of the cult responsible for running the sarin gas production for the attack, was stabbed in the gut with a long chef’s knife on live TV; my homestay family and I looked on in horror. On the morning of January 17, 1995, I woke to find my bed floating, seeming to dip into and out of a wave of wooden floor.All God's Children Can Dance is a rich story that sneaks up on you, knocks the reader off kilter, in the end makes one want to join in Yoshiya's dance. I also like one part of 'Landscape with Flatiron' where Miyake said " Tell you the truth, I don't have a refrigerator. The characters don't actually experience the earthquake directly, but it changes their life, unsettles and uneases them. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction.

All these stories revolve around the idea of identity and this one is probably the most blatant about it, in which a man starts looking at his own after his wife leaves him. So when I realized halfway through the last story in After the Quake that the main character was the same one from "Kidney Shaped Stone," it was as if the planets had aligned, the clouds parted and a single shaft of sunlight shot down to bathe me in a golden glow; everything was perfect in the universe. This was my first time reading Haruki Murakami's writing, and I was indeed more than intrigued and impressed.In the penultimate story, “super-frog saves tokyo,” a six-foot tall frog enlists help from a collection agent named Katagiri. Perhaps that is why the book’s hallucinatory qualities, so common in Murakami’s fiction, struck me—thanks to my tangential connection to that terrible year—as more like reportage than acid trip.

Yoshiya lives with his mother, who has recently been away helping her religious group provide earthquake relief. The earthquake is peripheral to each story at best and yet there is something decidedly central about its occurrence. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Murakami is constantly reminding his characters that recuperation, personal or national, is a process rather than a product, even when that process is surreal.That night, while Sayoko and Sala sleep together in the same bed, Junpei watches over them and decides that he will ask Sayoko to marry him when she wakes up.