After the Quake
Written in the shadow of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, after the quake gathers six stories set in the uneasy weeks between that disaster and the Tokyo subway gas attack. None of the stories takes place in Kobe itself; instead the earthquake trembles at the edge of each one, a distant catastrophe that unsettles the interior lives of people far from the rubble.
A man whose wife leaves him after days of watching the news carries a mysterious box north to Hokkaido. A mild-mannered loan officer comes home to find a giant talking frog who needs his help to stop an underground worm from destroying Tokyo. A woman travels to Thailand and confronts a grief she has carried for decades. Across these six pieces, Murakami trades his usual first-person voice for a cooler third-person register, watching ordinary people feel the ground shift beneath their emotional lives.
Compact and resonant, after the quake is one of Murakami's most cohesive collections, moving between deadpan surrealism and quiet realism to ask how people go on living once they sense how fragile everything is. It is a small book that carries a large aftershock.
A doctor vacationing in Thailand who confronts a long-buried grief and hatred, in Thailand.
A mild-mannered loan collection officer recruited by a giant talking frog to save Tokyo, in Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.
An electronics salesman abandoned by his wife who delivers a mysterious box to Hokkaido, in UFO in Kushiro.