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The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.
An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package—and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who has been raised to view himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may or may not be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. As haunting as dreams, as potent as oracles, the stories in After the Quake are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.
- Sales Rank: #110192 in Books
- Published on: 2003-05-13
- Released on: 2003-05-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .40" w x 5.20" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 147 pages
Amazon.com Review
Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West's favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in After the Quake are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of Jules and Jim. There's a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." With language that's never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There's no turning back for his people; there's only before and after the quake. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
These six stories, all loosely connected to the disastrous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, are Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Norwegian Wood) at his best. The writer, who returned to live in Japan after the Kobe earthquake, measures his country's suffering and finds reassurance in the inevitability that love will surmount tragedy, mustering his casually elegant prose and keen sense of the absurd in the service of healing. In "Honey Pie," Junpei, a gentle, caring man, loses his would-be sweetheart, Sayoko, when his aggressive best friend, Takatsuki, marries her. They have a child, Sala. He remains close friends with them and becomes even closer after they divorce, but still cannot bring himself to declare his love for Sayoko. Sala is traumatized by the quake and Junpei concocts a wonderful allegorical tale to ease her hurt and give himself the courage to reveal his love for Sayoko. In "UFO in Kushiro" the horrors of the quake inspire a woman to leave her perfectly respectable and loving husband, Komura, because "you have nothing inside you that you can give me." Komura then has a surreal experience that more or less confirms his wife's assessment. The theme of nothingness is revisited in the powerful "Thailand," in which a female doctor who is on vacation in Thailand and very bitter after a divorce, encounters a mysterious old woman who tells her "There is a stone inside your body.... You must get rid of the stone. Otherwise, after you die and are cremated, only the stone will remain." The remaining stories are of equal quality, the characters fully developed and memorable. Murakami has created a series of small masterpieces.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Noted Japanese author Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart) offers six short stories set around the time of the devastating 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Kobe, which killed thousands in January 1995. The stories are very loosely woven together by passing references made to the tragic event. Focusing on the relationships between people who are all broken by life, the stories include "UFO in Kushiro," in which a salesman comes home one day to find himself abandoned by his wife, who has left him a note and later asks for a divorce; "All God's Children Can Dance," which tells the story of Yoshiya, a man born out of wedlock to a religiously zealous woman (even being told by her that his birth was "divine") who later goes out in search of his father; and "Honey Pie," which describes the longstanding friendships of three college friends, a single man and a married couple, who grow older together wondering about the state of their relationships after the couple's divorce. However, in "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," Murakami uses earthquakes as the central theme; here a giant talking frog shows up in a man's apartment and asks him for his assistance in saving Tokyo from a major earthquake. Murakami's writing examines the state of the human condition in a manner similar to that of National Book Award winner Ha Jin, but Murakami's stories often end abruptly, leaving readers to determine for themselves how the stories are to be resolved, if at all. Public and academic libraries with collections of Murakami's work will probably want to add this one. Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Haunting ... enchanting ...
By Diana Poskrop
Two people look at the night sky. One sees darkness and dots of light. Another sees a thousand marvels.
As the shock of an earthquake wears off, a sort of soul-quake takes place. After all, if we can't rely on the ground under our feet to remain solid, what can we be certain of? Sometimes we KNOW that in the brain, but it takes an earthquake or terrorist attack for us to FEEL it in the gut -- for the knowing to be meaningful.
Something intangible but essential shakes loose in the people of Japan weeks after the Kobe earthquake. Like the rock mantle that once covered Kobe, neglected souls have liquefied. Now change is possible. For some, that means healing. For one, it means, not just losing, but unknowingly giving away his...soul(?). Another meets a heretofore hidden aspect of his Self. I guess it depends on what had been important in their lives and where they were headed before.
The stories are told gently, subtly and with respect. A writer's self-inflicted chains are broken and he finds his freedom. A dumpy, overly modest, milquetoast doormat of a man finds his true power. With the help of a guru/limo driver, a rock of hatred that even the soul-quake left intact is only now able to be recognized and dealt with.
I wouldn't presume to discuss Mr. Murakami's use of metaphor and allegory. I think each reader will find what s/he needs to find. ("When the student is ready....") That's one reason I'll be reading this book again soon: There's much to be found.
AFTER THE QUAKE, I suggest, is best read slowly and often, with soft and open awareness; it's to be contemplated upon.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Surreal Love Stories
By SYED-RAFAY AHMED
Murakami's stories stripped of their fantasy/surrealist veneer are at heart, love stories. The themes of love and loss constantly recur, where reality and fantasy effortlessly overlap and no easy denouements are forthcoming.
It is love, or rather, the obsessive yearning for love, which drives his characters and makes them embark on impossible quests; the object of their love is also the object of their search. And it is this most basic of emotion's that sustains his stories, gives them their human anchor, their warmth, poignancy and humour, even as they spin out of control into ever more preposterous trajectories. However there are no traditional endings to these untraditional love stories, no hands clasped at sunset, no passionate don't-ever-leave-me-again embraces...but even so, there is always, within the ambiguity of loving, the faintest hint at the possibility of redemption through love.
In "ufo in kushiro", the story opens as Komura's wife, after five days of watching coverage of the earthquake's horror, leaves him. She explains, "The problem is that you never give me anything. Or, to put it more precisely, you have nothing inside you that you can give me...living with you is like living with a chunk of air." To an extent, she's right: travelling to freezing Hokkaido because "cold or hot it was all the same to him", displaying next to no curiosity about the mysterious package a colleague has asked him to deliver, drinking coffee that is "more sign than substance", Komura shows little knowledge of or interest in his own interior landscape. Komura is almost perfectly passive, distant from both the world and his own emotions. In distant, cold Hokkaido, he meets a woman who asks him if what his wife said was true. He replies, "I'm not sure...I may have nothing inside me, but what would something be?" Moments later, she provokes in him a moment of violent rage, pure feeling-and in doing so shows him that there is indeed something inside him.
The Kobe disaster wakes these dazed characters, but not immediately. On the plane to Hokkaido, Komura reads coverage of the quake and thinks of his wife, "Why had she followed the TV earthquake reports with such intensity, from morning to night, without eating or sleeping? What could she have seen in them?" She has seen, of course, that everything can disappear in an instant, and she has begun to understand what this means to her life. Her leaving forces the same primal awareness on Komura.
In "all god's children can dance," Yoshiya is told as a little boy that "the Lord" is his father. When he grows up he stops believing that he is anyone special, or that his mother has given birth to him through immaculate conception. Because of this he also loses his faith. When his mother reveals to him that her abortionist, a man with a chewed-off earlobe, is his father, Yoshiya stalks the man he believes to be the one into a dark ghetto, a landscape as barren as his own heart where he finds nothing but the ever-widening mystery of himself.
The stories are all unpredictable and rich in their spare tellings and abrupt endings. Murakami uses the earthquake as a prism to view his characters' their fumbling revelations, and loneliness. We are reminded of our own fault lines in love and friendships and of trying to stand on ever-shifting ground. Emptiness and this unknown "something" (possibly love) that might fill it is what haunt's the characters in these stories when the earthquake rattles their dormant boxes.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
"What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real."
By Mary Whipple
In a simple, unpretentious, and totally accessible style, Murakami tells six tales, each with a message about life and death and love and loss. Simple, straightforward stories, haunting and hypnotic in tone, belie a complexity of themes and thought-provoking observations about the importance of creating your own identity, building relationships, sharing, and avoiding the emptiness of the bogeyman's box, "ready for everybody...[and] waiting with the lid open."
All the main characters are single or separated, and all feel isolated and empty, na�ve in matters of love and life. In "UFO in Kashiro," an abandoned husband agrees to help a friend by delivering a box to Hokkaido, only to discover that the box "contains the something that was inside you. You'll never get it back." In "Landscape in Flatiron," a 40-ish artist and a young girl meet and build a bonfire. "The fire itself has to be free," he remarks, while the young girl comments on the emptiness of her life, and they make plans for the rest of the evening. In "All God's Children Can Dance," a young man pursues the man he believes to be his father to an abandoned baseball field, "chasing the tail of the darkness inside [him]." "Thailand" features a doctor in her 40's who is told that she must get rid of the stone inside her and that "living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value."
In the last two stories, "Superfrog Saves Tokyo," and "Honey Pie," Murakami begins to offer more hope and direction to his characters. Superfrog, a 6' tall frog who needs a plodding banker to help him fight the Worm and save Tokyo from an earthquake, due to strike soon, teaches that "the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose." And in "Honey Pie," which brings all these themes together, a young man has an opportunity to find happiness with the only woman he's ever loved and her young daughter, and determines that he will "never let anyone...try to put them into that crazy box, not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar."
Despite the fact that Murakami states his themes overtly, the stories themselves are enigmatic and the action unpredictable, and the reader will ponder his meanings and his images long after the stories are finished. Wonderful descriptions, small details which reflect the characters' class and educational level, sympathetic and well drawn characters, and a sense that the world is absurd and illogical make this short collection unforgettable. Mary Whipple
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