Haruki Murakami’s “After the Quake” is a witty, amusing collection of short stories which alternates between lyrical prose and quick dialog. It is an easy and quick read with at least a couple of stories that are emotionally compelling. Yet it’s hard to decide if, in a time when there are so many authors to read, so many collections to choose from, this particular collection, as a whole, is worth-while enough to be picked from the slush-pile of options.

Though the stories are not interconnected via their characters or situations, they all take place in the months directly following the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The settings and styles of stories vary from gritty realism to the fantastic and fable-like: from a young teenaged runaway working at a convenience store, to an old, jaded bank collections officer trying to save Tokyo from the next earthquake by uniting himself with a gigantic, talking frog.

My biggest complaint is that Murakami’s collection could have been great. There are sprinklings of elegant, characterizing, prose, like when a wife leaves her husband by complaining that living with him is like, “living with a chunk of air”, and a divorced doctor who learns, while taking a vacation to Thailand, that “living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.” Many of the characters are easy to sympathize with, the dialog is both clever and quick.

Yet many of the stories seem to lack substance – you finish the story and think: okay, what next? Many of our title characters seem to go mini-epiphanies that you’re not sure are either earned or justified: in “All God’s Children Can Dance” a young man living with his attractive, overly religious mother follows a stranger he believes to be his biological father only to end up in a deserted baseball field, dancing and philosophizing, in “ufo in kushiro” a newly divorced electronics salesman agrees to deliver a mysterious package, ends up in a new city, in bed with a stranger and again, finds himself questioning the deeper meaning of his life. The situations are creatively, and sometimes intricately, wrought, but feel somehow artificial, unable to stir our deeper emotions.

The stories with protagonists and situations that were easier to relate to felt as though they went on just a little too long – the epiphanies that felt earned also felt a little overwritten, and might have worked a little more effectively if they had ended a paragraph, or sometimes a whole scene earlier. In “Thailand” a divorced doctor takes a life-changing vacation in Thailand, where her hired driver/ vacation coordinator seems to sense all of her needs perfectly, eventually arranging for her to see a local dream analyzer… Afterwards, when our protagonist tries to talk to her driver about her dreams and fears, he replies, “Cast off mere words. Words turn into stones…” to silence her. It’s a great moment and we really get it at that point… but unfortunately, Murakami doesn’t take his own advice, and the story continues to drill in this point long after we, as the reader, get it, greatly weakening the overall impact of the story.

It’s difficult giving this collection a rating… because on the one hand, there are some truly entertaining and really creative/ innovative things happening. There’s even gasp a happy ending or two (so rare in what’s considered literary fiction… but overall I just don’t think there is enough on the good side to balance out the faults and imperfections…


Just the Facts:

Published by: Vintage International
Length: 147 pages
Year: 2002


Stories and Synopses:

1. “ufo in kushiro” – after the earthquake, an electronic salesman’s wife becomes obsessed with the earthquake news coverage and then leaves her husband… at a loose end, and newly divorced, he agrees to deliver a colleague’s package while on vacation

2. “landscape with flatiron” – a runaway teenager befriends an older artist who likes to make bonfires on the beach from driftwood

3. “all god’s children can dance” – a once-promiscuous teenager becomes pregnant and finds religion, raising her son to believe he is the son of god. When she finally tells him the truer version of events, he follows a stranger who he believes to be his biological father.

4. “Thailand” – a recently divorced doctor/ researcher seems more upset about whether her past lover has been killed in the recent earthquake than she is affected by her divorce. She meets a driver /guide who becomes something of an emotional advisor/guide

5. “super-frog saves Tokyo” – a loans collections office is visited by a giant, talking frog who convinces him he needs help saving Tokyo from a giant worm about to cause a gigantic earthquake.

6. “honey pie” – a writer recalls his decade and a half friendship with two people – a male reporter friend and his wife, a woman our protagonist has been in love with since their college days.




Recommended: No