Customer Reviews

After the Quake: Stories

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

While I doubt there would ever come a day when I wouldn't read a new book of his, I do have to say that it's felt to me for a while (since Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) like he wasn't exactly in his groove any more. Maybe it was the tighter focus of those later books that didn't appeal to me as much. Whatever the reason, After the Quake is the man at his best. The stories are short and the book is overall a quick read, but that... density... is back. Each one bears re-reading. I still wouldn't recommend it as the best starting point (I for some reason always recommend Sheep Chase or Hardboiled for that), but still, great stuff.

All of Murakami's novels are best sellers, and he is perhaps the most recognized and noted Japanese author in the U.S. and around the world. Murakami is one of my favorite authors. I have enjoyed all of his previous novels, and now this little book of short stories kept me turning the pages past the midnight hour. Murakami drew me in with his simple language and the powerful dialogue of his intriguing characters. These six stories are all related to the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995. The stories are set in the months between the natural disaster and the poison gas attacks that occurred in Tokyo's subways. Both of these events dramatically changed the physical and social landscape of Japan. For each of the characters in these stories, the earthquake's emotional aftershock set off an unreal chain of events.

I enjoyed all of these stories, but a few were my favorites. In "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo", a loan-collector teams up with a man-sized frog to fight an enormous worm that threatens to destroy Tokyo. In "Landscape With Flatiron", we learn about Miyake's passion in building bonfires with his companion Junko, and what it all symbolizes. And last but not least, in "Honey Pie", we are presented with a complex, passionate story about a love triangle that takes place over many years.

We are exposed to a lot of human suffering in these stories. Murakami, however, sheds light and hope in all of these stories by showing us the courage, strength, and compassion these devastated people possess in overcoming any tragedy that they may have to face. I always look forward to Murakami's new novels. Now, I can, hopefully, look forward to more short stories by this talented author. This is a beautifully written collection of stories. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Joe Hanssen

This is for the reader who posted a note about the title story mentioned by the inside cover: the original Japanese title of this collection is "Kamisama no kodomo ha minna odoru," or "All God's Children Can Dance." My guess is, they wrote the inside cover and then decided later on to change the title to "After the Quake." I guess the editor missed that :-)

I'm a die-hard Murakami fan, so nothing I can say about this collection would be fair or subjective. The ellusive "title story" left me shaken, and I ended up reading it three more times to figure out what it was that haunted me. Wow...

Murakami's new novel just came out here in Japan! "Kafka on the Shore," a big fat monster of a book that's been published in two volumes. I'm about halfway into the first part, and structually, it's turning out to be a lot like "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of World" in that there are two stories going on simultaneously and seem, in some way, to be connected. And like "Wind-up Bird Chronicle," war-history makes up a lot o the plot. Oh, when will the English translation come out!!

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, naïve 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

At the end of my first semester as a graduate student I was faced with the task of writing two fifteen to twenty page papers on the works of Ihara Saikaku. Having already finished reading Five Women who Loved Love and The Life of an Amorous Man, I was then faced with the task of reading his longest work The Great Mirror of Male Love which, after a long and dense introduction by the translator goes into minute detail about the male loves of the samurai and kabuki actors. Faced with the task of reading all forty short stories contained in the book, I turned to Murakami Haruki's after the quake to give my mind a break from the massive tome of Edo period homo-erotica. Since that time after the quake has been a story collection that I have turned to a number of times when I needed something quick and enjoyable to read when faced with a large number of books for graduate school. This, of course, does not mean that after the quake is fluff reading, because that is far from the case. The time period this collection of short stories takes place is during February 1995, the month sandwiched between the Kobe Earthquake which occurred on January 17th and the Aum Shinrikyo's sarin gas attacks that occurred on March 20th of the same year. Although none of the six short stories' protagonists were directly harmed by the earthquake, each one is affected by its "aftershocks."

UFO in Kushiro: the collection opens with the story of Komura a handsome, successful sales representative whose wife leaves him after the Kobe Earthquake. Leaving a note that states that living with Komura is like living with a "chunk of air" Komura's wife heads back north to her home and sends her husband the divorce papers. Needing a break from work in order to think, Komura goes to Hokkaido to deliver a package for a coworker and there he meets two young women who try to put his life into perspective.

Landscape with Flatiron: This short story tells the tale of Junko a young woman who ran away to Ibaraki to escape the stifling atmosphere of her home and school. Seemingly content with her surfer boyfriend Keisuke, Junko also enjoys the company of Miyake a small, balding man who likes to make bonfires on the beach. This short story describes what may be the final meeting between Junko and Miyake. In my opinion, this might be the saddest story within the book.

All God's Children can Dance: Yoshiya seems like a decent enough fellow. He might enjoy drinking too much, but he gets along with his coworkers and he has a string of girlfriends who like the way he dances. He is also the son of God. Or at least this is what he is told by his mother who was "saved" by a member of new religion group when she was going to commit suicide after becoming pregnant with Yoshiya after following her doctor/lover's contraceptive methods perfectly. Not believing that he is the son of God, Yoshiya eventually spots a man who looks like an older version of the man his mother slept with almost three decades before. One day pursues this man and he finds...

Thailand: After going to a large gathering of thyroid specialists, Satsuki decides to spend some of her vacation time in Thailand. In the capable hands of her chauffeur Nimit, Satsuki is able to relax, swim, and enjoy impeccable little cucumber and cheese sandwiches. However, anger burns within her. With her ex-husband living in Kobe, Satsuki hopes that the bane of her life has been crushed the fallen debris. However, to be truly whole again, she must release he anger.

Super Frog Saves Tokyo: Katagiri is an average fellow, perhaps even below average. Short, bald, and basically unlikable, the only thing that he is successful at is his job collecting overdue loans. However, one day, something spectacular happens to Katagiri. After arriving home from the grocery store, Katagiri encounters a six-foot tall frog in his kitchen. Able to quote Nabokov, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, Frog informs Katagiri that he needs his help in the battle with Worm, a huge blind worm that was awakened by the earthquake in Kobe and is determined to cause an enormous earthquake that will destroy Tokyo and only Katagiri can help him prevent it!

Honey Pie: Probably the sappiest short story that Murakami has ever penned, however, it is also quite effective in tugging on the heart strings. A trio in college: Junpei, Sayoko, and Takatsuki spent all of there time with each other eating out, going to movies, drinking beer, and sharing notes. Brought together by the outgoing Takatsuki, Sayoko and Junpei generally went along with what Takatsuki wanted to do. Also, although Junpei loved Sayoko, and it seemed Sayoko loved him as well, he was afraid to express his feelings, and Takatsuki beat him to the punch and asked Sayoko to marry him. Although his world almost crumbled around hi, Junpei endured to become a moderately successful short story writer. Now Sayoko and Takatsuki are divorced and Sayoko lives alone with her daughter Sala. Can Junpei finally tell the woman he loves his true feelings?

While the earthquake itself is rarely addressed directly, it plays a role in that it gives a jolt to each of the protagonists' lives and changes them for better or worse. Murakami, a loner himself, can perfectly paint the portrait of loneliness and it is this skill that makes these stories so effective and while it May not be one of Murakami's best works, after the quake is still a good, quick read and it might be a good starting point for the Murakami novice.

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.

Each of the short stories in the excellent "After the Quake" are linked to the terrible earthquake that shook Kobe in Jan'95. Although none are actually set in Kobe, the epicentre of the devastation, allusions to the disaster flit briefly into the radar of each story before quickly dipping out of sight again. Though the characters in these haunting stories are far removed from the scene of the tragedy, the earthquake, nonetheless, reverberates in subtle ways deep into their troubled lives.

In "Landscape With Flat Iron", Junko, a young woman, enjoys the company of Miyake, a forty-something painter who lights midnight beach bonfires stacked from driftwood. Miyake can look at fires in the way "a sculptor can imagine the pose of a figure hidden in a lump of stone." Gazing at the shapes the bonfire makes elevates Junko to a higher plane of being where revelations and deeper truths come to her...... similar revelatory moments are experienced in "All God's Children Can Dance" by Yoshiya - he has been following the man he thought was the father he has been searching for - as he stands on the pitchers mound in a deserted baseball pitch bathed in the light of a huge moon...... In "Thailand", a female doctor on vacation, soured and embittered by a divorce, is driven by her chauffeur to see an old woman who informs her, "There is a stone inside your body ...You must get rid of the stone."...... The earthquake is perhaps more central to "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" than it is in other stories. A giant frog enlists Kalagiri's help to save Tokyo from a gigantic worm that causes earthquakes when it's angry. Frog says earthquakes make people realise how fragile the ordinary world - in this case the city of Tokyo - really is. Murakami here, is referring not just to the fragile physical environment but also to the fragility of emotional rocks such as love, marriage, the family unit, friendships that underpin our inner lives.

"Honey Pie", the last and best story (IMO), is also the most conventional. Junpei, too shy to move in on Sayoko, his heart's desire, loses out in the marriage stakes to the more forward Takasaki, his best friend. Sala, the young child of the marriage, deeply fears "the earthquake man". When Sayoko and Takasaki later divorce, Junpei, who has remained close to them, is still unable to express his undying love for Sayoko. He tells Sala a story to ease her mind about "the earthquake man"...

If you enjoy these unconventional short stories, often containing elements both of realism and surrealism, and often with no neatly wrapped-up endings, then you may wish to try another Murakami short story collection, "The Elephant Vanishes".

I am never able to say exactly why it is I became hooked on Murakami's writing. The best explanation I can give is that his writing has such an innate vitality and originality that by just reading and reflecting on what he writes, as cliche as it might seem, I feel extraordinary happy to be alive. Murakami's gift for writing is rivaled by few, and his works leave a unique impression on every person who reads them.

However, as a writer, Murakami appears to be going through an obvious transition, which seems to have started after Japan experienced "the Quake" and the Tokyo subway gas attacks. Murakami's last few books (Sputnik Sweetheart in particular) have been extremely reflective, almost brooding. The stories might be better technically than his earlier works, but they lacked something, that ironic humor, warmth, and spunk that his earlier stories, like Dance, Dance, Dance (my personal favorite) and Wind-Up Bird overflowed with.

On top of that, when I discovered that this book is not one story but a series of short stories, I was intrigued to see which Haruki would show up. I was not disappointed. The stories in this book combine the emotion, humor, and excitement of his earlier works with the reflection and beauty of his most recent books to result in great stories, and in a couple cases, awesome ones.

By far, my favorites in this collection were All of God's Children Can Dance and Honey Pie, but the other stories are excellent as well. "Landscape with Flatiron" is the only story that didn't do a whole lot for me, but the other stories shine so brightly that that was only a minor detail for me at least.

I really hope that Murakami continues on in the direction he has started with in this collection of stories. His next novel, Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore) is due out in a week in Japan, and at 800+ pages (in the Japanese version) it's certainly his longest work in a while. I can't wait to read it.

.... they would comprise a suite, something like one of Mozart's divertimentos, six movements in contrasting tempi, the first story an andante, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th various stately dances, the 5th a scherzo, and the last story an allegro ma no troppo. The collection certainly has that kind of structural unity in addition to the lightly suggested temporal unity of incidents shortly after the Kobe earthquake. Okay... I admire that. I like long short stories. They're my favorite form these days. Alice Munro is easily my favorite active writer in English, and I very much admire the suite-like cohesion of her story collections. However, Haruki Murakami is no Alice Munro, and perhaps it's my sense of what a really great writer can do with the form that keeps me from appreciating Murakami more.

For one thing, Murakami's style - at the level of syntax, vocabulary, imagery - is not interesting in itself. I hesitate to judge too severely, since I'm reading in translation, but the language just isn't compelling. Other short story writers, Raymond Carver for instance, have written powerfully in 'flat' language, but their writing tends to sound authentic, like some local human's local way of talking. Murakami's language sounds deliberately 'kept simple', just as his characters are kept even more ordinary than most of us really are. In the effort to avoid any kind of literary language, Murakami sounds, to me, extremely literary, as if he were writing to the style sheet of every literary journal in.... ah, well, in Japan? Then once again, I have to specify that I can't judge his style in Japanese.

Since style ISN'T the reason for reading Murakami in English, then what do we look for? Action? Suspense? Erotic excitement? No, no, these are stories for more intellectually sensitive readers. Characterization? Yes, I'd say that's Murakami's strength; although we don't know his personae well, we catch their individuality. Thematic insights? Hmmm. I have a feeling that insights into "the human condition" are intended, perhaps even bluntly expressed in subtle asides, but I can't recall them when I finish the story. I have to wonder if "the human condition" is quite as kinky as Murakami and other writers of his generation portray...

Ooops! I said the G-word! could it be that simple? That I don't pulse with excitement at these stories merely because Murakami's temporal world isn't my world? That I'm too old to be intrigued by his situations?

Bottom line: Hiroki Murakami is a writer of skill and humanity, and I'll not hesitate to read more of him.

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, naïve in matters of love and life. In "UFO in Kashiro," an abandoned husband agrees to help a friend by delivering a box to Hokkaido, learning 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. 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, 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.

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 memorable. pp Mary Whipple