After the Quake

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Ushers the reader into a hallucinatory world where where dreams and real-life nightmares are impossible to tell apart. Many of his novels have themes and titles that invoke classical music, such as the three books making up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's opera), Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann usually known in English as The Prophet Bird), and The Bird-Catcher (a character in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute).

This can often be the case with short story collections, but I've never felt quite so polar about stories in the same book before by the same author. Yet these two disasters, followed by that public display of violent revenge, felt like a door swinging open to something new and unrecognizable. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. The characters in the stories are having strange dreams, or are moving in an alternate dream reality.Katagiri, who wonders why he was chosen to help Frog, describes himself as a short, balding, pot-bellied, nearsighted forty year old man with no wife, no children, no friends, no social skills, and no respect from anyone. The man who Yoshiya follows gets off at a station in the Chiba Prefecture and hails down a cab; Yoshiya is able to get a cab to follow the man.

After reading his sole non-fiction work, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, about the Tokyo subway nerve-gas attack on March 20, 1995, I was led to this collection of fictional short stories set in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995, which occurred only two months before the gas attack.He's there during good times and in bad, and instead of seeing him as an intruder, he's always welcome. And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” is the highlight of the collection ~ a nightmarish work of magical realism that is at turns humorous, grave, and gross. 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.

Katagiri wakes up in the hospital the next morning; he asks the nurse if he has been shot and if there has been an earthquake and she says neither has happened. Each of the stories touches on the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, although only gently- none of the stories are based there and none of them feature the earthquake as a main part of the tale. After Shimao apologizes for the joke, Komura lies down again and ruminates about his excursion to Kushiro. Reading these stories as a group puts me in mind of the atmosphere after the 9/11 attack here in NYC.

For the characters in after the quake , the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. 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. Indeed, a good short story should hang over you and linger in your mind, but not all of them were that engaging in their content. Haruki Murakami set this collection of six short stories a month after the destructive 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.