After the Quake

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Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. It became a catalyst for individuals to reassess their lives with unexpected consequences for themselves and their families and friends around them.

Overall I feel like I have to give it 3/5 stars, but still recommended for those who don't mind if the stories aren't completely wrapped up in a satisfactory manner.I enjoyed how enigmatic everything seemed in the opening story, "UFO in Kushiro," a story in which the main character's wife leaves him after watching coverage of the earthquake. Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. There is something written on the stone, but she cannot read it because it is in Japanese: small black characters of some kind. So “perhaps we should think of After the Quake as an investigation of the psychic preconditions for the attack. I know everyone consumes books differently, but if you’ve ever considered audio books, I think a book like this of short stories is where you might get the most value out of it.

Yet these two disasters, followed by that public display of violent revenge, felt like a door swinging open to something new and unrecognizable. That evening, while transferring between subway lines to get home, he sees a man in his mid-fifties who has a missing earlobe and decides to follow him surreptitiously. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.She tells Satsuki that she had a white stone about the size of a child's fist inside of her; to rid of it she will have a dream in which she will have to hold a snake until it swallows the stone for her. I felt happy in the way that you do when you hear a song for the first time and realize, Hey, this is really good, but I also felt sad. It's the particular kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange. Two months later, on March 20, during rush hour, members of the apocalyptic religious cult Aum Shinrikyo placed bags of sarin gas on the major subway lines in Tokyo.

Reading these stories as a group puts me in mind of the atmosphere after the 9/11 attack here in NYC. One was suggestive of great and transformative personal change spurred on by the realisation of how fleeting life can be, but it didn’t go anywhere. Yoshiya lives with his mother, who has recently been away helping her religious group provide earthquake relief. Perhaps it’s the central tie-in, the connection to the Kobe earthquake, that makes them stand out, hold them together. 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.The earthquake is peripheral to each story at best and yet there is something decidedly central about its occurrence. Afterwards, the three go to a love hotel; Keiko knows the owner and says he can stay there for the duration of his trip. After the Quake was so brilliant that I didn't want the stories to end, and when they did, I felt like I was saying good-bye to a dear friend.

Perhaps my favorite, "Super-Frog saves Tokyo" is a surrealistic and humorous tale about a frog who recruits Katagiri, a loan collection agent, to help him save Tokyo. The man gets out at a remote location full of walls and barbed wire and walks away; Yoshiya follows him.This slim little volume of short stories (only six of them in all), all loosely connected to the 1995 Kobe earthquake, didn't garner as much critical acclaim as some of Murakami's other books. Then there follows a short tale about a disaffected family man who likes to build bonfires on the beach at midnight. So when I realized halfway through the last story in After the Quake that the main character was the same one from "Kidney Shaped Stone," it was as if the planets had aligned, the clouds parted and a single shaft of sunlight shot down to bathe me in a golden glow; everything was perfect in the universe. The title After the Quake immediately suggests that these are stories relating to an earthquake when in fact these are short stories that were written after an earthquake in Japan and are very loosely related at best to the actual quake. He then tells the story of how polar bears mate once a year and how the males run away afterwards and both wonder about the existential meaning of the story.