After the Quake

After the Quake (published in Japan in 2000 and in English in 2002) by Japanese author Haruki Murakami is a collection of six short stories set in Japan in the aftermath of the Great Hanshin Earthquake and before the Tokyo subway sarin attack. They’re all very Murakami, with his bright, breezy style, humor mixed with sentiment, and mostly young characters finding themselves in surprising and bizarre situations.

In “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” my favorite of the six, a massive frog calls on a regular nine-to-fiver to help save Tokyo from an impending earthquake caused by a gigantic, angry worm dwelling beneath Shinjuku. The story at first is delivered a bit like The Metamorphosis, and later it feels as though the frog represents a failing sense of duty in the Japanese consciousness, while the worm has been absorbing the frustrations of post-bubble Japanese society, and perhaps some of its moral decay (it lives beneath Kabukicho). The ending is interspersed with dreamlike fragments.

The other five stories contain few, if any, supernatural elements, though they share similar themes. Most prominent is a sense of emptiness carried by many of the main characters, something that weighs on them at this particular moment, when both they and Japan itself seem to be at a crossroads. The characters and stories are memorable, though they also left me wanting to read them again.