Review
after the quake
2002
translated by Jay Rubin
Alfred A. Knopf
Review by Peter Young in Big Sky #1 (2013).
For some enigmatic reason Haruki Murakami wanted this collection’s English title to be all lower case, as if the capital A and Q had been shaken down to lower case level: the six stories here are all set in February of 1995, a month after the devastation of the Kobe earthquake (and a month before the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that Murakami explored in Underground), and while the characters he writes about were not directly affected by the earthquake it nevertheless created some other far-reaching and more personal seismic shifts. This is Murakami’s focus here, and only the science fictional ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ has his trademark use of surreal imagery, with the rest being very down-to-earth and all told in the third person – again, a departure from Murakami’s previous shortform style. He has a deft way with characterisation and these stories all get their point across with an easy-going precision. I was pleasantly surprised that best story of all is ‘Thailand’, about a bitter Japanese woman on holiday there who, with her ex-husband back in Kobe, is shown an unusual way to let go of her heart of stone. Murakami is another author I’ve since explored more of, all as a result of reading this good collection.