Review: After the Quake, by Haruki Murakami

[sharplittleteeth]

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist. He combines a folksy, casual prose style with often surreal and ambiguous plots. Apparently, he's ridiculously popular in Japan.

After the Quake is a collection of short stories about the Kobe earthquake. Actually, there are no tales from ground zero here. The stories are about how the earthquake effected the rest of Japan.

There are six stories in the collection. All of them share a similar pattern: the main character is somehow connected to Kobe, but that connection is distant or tenuous. When the cataclysm strikes, it serves only to remind them how lost and hollow their lives are. Some of them struggle to change, others sink into resignation.

With the exception of "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" (about a giant frog that allies with a bank officer to fight a monstrous underground worm), the stories are more realistic than Murakami's novels.

Perhaps that's why I came away a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong. The stories are good, and interesting. But they're not revelatory. And they're so similar in theme and plot that they feel slightly repetitive.

If you've never read Murakami, this is perhaps not the place to start. I'd recommend Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World instead. It's a great book, and will give you a much better idea of why people like Murakami.

Comments

[damien6.livejournal.com]

He just had a new book out as well. Something Kafka, I don't remember the title. Have you seen that one yet?
Murakami has an incredibly precise way with words and ideas, but his characters are so passive sometimes I just want to shake them by the end of the book.

[sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com]

Kafka on the Shore. No, I haven't read it yet. There's quite a few Murakami I haven't read yet. And yes, his characters do tend to suffer from malaise.

[reinzero.livejournal.com]

a few months ago i picked up After The Quake for a tenner at a little remaindered book store on Gertrude St. i liked it fine, just for being what was - six snapshots of people's lives, loosely focused on ordinary folk coping with loss or emptiness . . people who were on the cusp of change. actually, i was really charmed by the way the stories showed people at a languid crisis-point - their mental 'prelude to change', but then left reader to ponder what would come next for the understated protagonists..

while it certainly lacked the power and narrative force of Murakami's major novels, i enjoyed After The Quake as something small, subtle and earnest.