After the Quake

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You hang on every word as if the next sentence is going to tell you what you’ve been waiting to find out. That April, Hideo Murai, a member of the cult responsible for running the sarin gas production for the attack, was stabbed in the gut with a long chef’s knife on live TV; my homestay family and I looked on in horror. 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.

In fact, all of ATQ’s stories are suffused with Junpei’s desire: a hunger for fiction that can offer alternatives to the cycle of violence and revenge, within which characters remain trapped. Ultima, "Placinta cu miere" este povestea micutei Sara care il viseaza pe Nenea Cutremur si se trezeste tipand noapte de noapte, epuizata de acest cosmar care se tot repeta. After the Quake is a collection of 6 short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, written between 1999 and 2000. 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. In the penultimate story, “super-frog saves tokyo,” a six-foot tall frog enlists help from a collection agent named Katagiri.I quite liked “Thailand” because it had some color (music and magical spices) and no such big passivity and “Honey Pie” with a fine silent love story, emotional and cute kid and the view to the world through the fairytales. I felt it was about time to get back into his work and picked up this little short story collection. The single 88 minute episode covered four of the six stories from the book: UFO in Kushiro, Thailand, Super-Frog Saves Tokyo and Honey Pie.

Perhaps that is why the book’s hallucinatory qualities, so common in Murakami’s fiction, struck me—thanks to my tangential connection to that terrible year—as more like reportage than acid trip.Atmosfera si peisajul descris mi-a adus aminte de acele modele imprimate pe tricouri cu ajutorul fierului de calcat.

In typical Murakami style some stories include the surreal whilst others focus on people whose lives somehow feel empty, at least at that moment; some are outsiders and some seem a little lost. After reading his sole non-fiction work, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, about the Tokyo subway nerve-gas attack on March 20, 1995, I was led to this collection of fictional short stories set in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995, which occurred only two months before the gas attack. Even the superficial characters in his stories are so humanized that you don't even realise the difference.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami's characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman. I must confess that I hadn't bought and read this book because I thought it was a chronicle; so, great was my surprise when I found a collection of short stories as marvellously written and mind-blowing as all Murakami's works have proved to be.

When he is in high school he learns that his father, according to his mother, is an obstetrician who she "had knowledge" of during her high school days; she had been seeing this man because she needed advice regarding abortions and contraception. Well it seems that Murakami is better with 3000 page novels than with short stories: even if each one starts interestingly, he seems to run into trouble when it comes to ending a story rapidly. In a world where even the ground beneath our feet can't be relied on, imagination becomes less of a luxury and more of a duty. She talks with Nimit about jazz and the quake; they also talk about her former husband who left her because he said that she did not want to have children.

Watching coverage of the disaster on the news was something that came up in several stories, and I can imagine how that can compound this emotion. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. Takatsuki is unable to join the three on their trip to the zoo due to him securing an interview in Okinawa at the last minute. Bello l'approdo finale, con tanto di atmosfera surreale a stemperare l'amara disillusione dietro la vicenda.