After the Quake: Stories

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Six stories set in the psychic aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake — though none of them take place in Kobe. A man's wife leaves him after watching days of earthquake coverage. A collection agent is visited by a giant talking frog who needs his help saving Tokyo from an underground worm. A woman follows a mysterious stranger into the desert. The tremors here are emotional, not geological — aftershocks that ripple outward through the lives of people who weren't even there. Murakami at his most restrained and his most strange, often in the same paragraph. These stories occupy the exact border between realism and fable, where a catastrophe that happened to strangers somehow reshapes your interior world. The earthquake in these stories isn't the one in Kobe. It's the one inside each character — the fault line they didn't know they were standing on.