Haruki Murakami: After the Quake
Along with the gas attack on the Tokyo Subway at the hands of a religious cult, the Kobe earthquake was a significant event in Japan in the 1990s. As with the Tokyo gas attack, Haruki Murakami tackles the after-effects of the earthquake on the media and public opinion, and highlights how such an incident can affect the public collectively on a national level and on the level of individuals; in contrast with his journalistic and factual approach to the former, he instead uses the earthquake as a starting point for a collection of short fictional works. In that sense, After the Quake is a concept album of short stories: none of them depict that infamous natural disaster that struck Kobe in 1995, but instead take a number of people and situations within Japan who are connected to the event in more indirect and abstract ways. Directly or not, all are connected to a common theme: that of a natural disaster coinciding with turning points in their lives.
After the Quake can be enjoyed as a stand-alone anthology of his short stories in the same way as, say, his Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman or The Elephant Vanishes collections. This particular selection however can also be read as a cohesive whole, thanks to that common thread: allusions to earthquakes and the mysteries of nature and coincidence. Inevitably some stories will work better than others from reader to reader, depending on what exactly one wishes to draw from what they have to tell. Some are shocking, some are touching while others are just plain odd - all however exhibit Murakami’s trademark pop culture references, dabblings in the supernatural and brilliantly-realised observations relating to the everyday.
Taken individually they are great for reading in the space of a lunch break at work or a short train journey; as is so often the case short stories have their own charm at being able to take the scantest or most abstract of ideas and make use of them. Unfortunately there is therefore no opportunity to weave a complex narrative or extended character development; the characters we meet in these short tales are often interesting but there is no time to linger and get to know them better.
After the Quake does not therefore set out to do the same thing as a novel: it conveys simpler ideas and messages, but these are component parts of concepts too all-encompassing for even a fully-fledged novel to address. The events in these stories appear to be completely unrelated, but this is never confirmed and it is up to the reader to decide if this is indeed the case. One piece is that of a woman who believes her vengeful feelings towards a man who lives in the area affected by the quake were the cause of the disaster; another involves an ordinary office worker called upon by a giant frog to fight a worm beneath Tokyo which is threatening to cause an earthquake there as well. With each story there is social commentary, plus nagging questions regarding cause and effect, fate, coincidence and much else besides; on the other hand they could just as easily be snapshots taken in modern Japan sometime in February 1995, albeit in Murakami’s surreal, dreamlike universe.
This collection actually shines a spotlight on modern culture and values as much as it does on the Kobe disaster; the detached nature of their events in relation to the quake itself is itself indicative of modern attitudes to newsworthy events, which are more often than not reported matter-of-factly by the media. Many of the people portrayed here see the quake as a distant problem, far removed from their own lives; as indeed it probably is in many cases, but the tantalising possibility remains that we are all part of a bigger picture that none of us can comprehend. While it appears to be irrelevant the threads of causality may tie it to them after all, challenging modern attitudes that can be summed up by the oft-spoken opinion “This has nothing to do with me.” While nobody in these stories is actually in Kobe at the time the quake strikes, the distant rumbles and aftershocks can be felt metaphorically by incidents in their lives that occur at that point in time.
The individual helplessly steered by the forces of nature and causality, often alone and lost, is a common theme of Murakami’s too but in this case it manifests itself as a variety of individuals whose lives may or not experience a pivotal moment as a result of an earthquake in a distant town. Perhaps because of the book’s impartial and more distant stance all of the stories are told from the third-person perspective as opposed to the more common first-person, often unnamed narrator who forms the reader’s point of reference in many of his works. This suggests that After the Quake is a more strongly observational piece than much of his writing, which often feels very intimate and personal in what it portrays.
In Summary
As an introduction to Murakami’s idiosyncratic writing style and his ability to portray the trivial and profound simultaneously, After the Quake is a good place to start. It has that unnerving ability to seem irrelevant and vague at first glance, only to plant seeds in the reader’s mind and encourage a re-read to confirm or deny the connections and hidden meanings. It’s a fascinating and thought-provoking journey through the human condition when faced with the distant spectre of natural disaster…only to step back to examine the consequences without directly touching on the disaster at all.
Posted on April 11th, 2008 @ 2:47 am
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