After the Quake

Product Information

The devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995 makes an appearance in all the stories, but only in the periphery. Nimit helps her find a pool away from the hotel and chauffeurs her there every day for five days; he also provides her with lunch. In the penultimate story, “super-frog saves tokyo,” a six-foot tall frog enlists help from a collection agent named Katagiri. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original. Bellissima l'immagine profondamente carveriana dell'immobilismo di fronte al televisore - i drammi esterni diventano palpabili quando la vita privata cessa negli stimoli, verità amarissima - e tutto sommato buoni gli intenti, ma il mordente si perde con una storia che sta in piedi con le stampelle e spegne la poca tensione narrativa con alcuni picchi di kitsch non indifferente.

All six stories are told in the third person, as opposed to Murakami's much more familiar first person narrative established in his previous work. Junko, a runaway, and Keisuke, surfer and rock music enthusiast, share a place in a small seaside town in the Ibaraki Prefecture. Even the superficial characters in his stories are so humanized that you don't even realise the difference. Haruki Murakami set this collection of six short stories a month after the destructive 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. 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. This collection of stories was a sensitive and imaginative response to the devastation caused by the earthquake. They then proceed to have intercourse on the living room couch and Junpei continually holds back on ejaculation, not wanting the moment to end. Komura, an early-thirties salesman living in Tokyo, comes home from work five days after the quake to find that his wife of five years has left him.

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. Tabata that he has incestuous feelings for his mother, but decided to hold back out of respect for his guide. Together they provide a backdrop for “Frog”~ a world shaken by earthquake, a people shaken by the naked fact of impermanence and the existential dread of meaninglessness. I felt it was about time to get back into his work and picked up this little short story collection. The man gets out at a remote location full of walls and barbed wire and walks away; Yoshiya follows him.While the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake is not directly addressed in Haruki Murakami's after the quake , this disaster is a unifying presence that connects the collection's six short stories. 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.