Some thoughts on "after the quake," by Haruki Murakami

I recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, after the quake. Like the stories in Dubliners, Spiks, and Drown, the six stories in this book are all interlaced with the same “referential material,” as Shkovsky would say: the earthquake that decimated the city of Kobe, Japan, in January 17, 1995.

Unlike Dubliners and Drown, though, the characters in these stories don’t reappear throughout; while they definitely seem to inhabit the same world, they do not bump into each other, as the characters in a Robert Altman film would (for an Altmanesque—and, while we're at it, highly cinematic—Murakami book, see After Dark, a quiet, beautiful tone poem of a novel). Rather, the stories function like the pieces of a symphony: variations on a theme.

Instead of focusing on characters directly affected by the calamity, Murakami chooses in these tales to tackle those for whom the calamity is a peripheral fact: a woman spends “five straight days . . . in front of the television, starng at crumbled banks and hospitals…;” a painter who left his wife and children years ago suddenly thinks of them when the earthquake hits—for he used to live with them in Kobe; a woman, who has been seething with resentment for her ex-husband (who lives in Kobe) for years, who has prayed for his violent death, wonders with terror and sadness if the earthquake is the universe’s perverse way of making her wish come true; and on and on. We see the tragedy through the eyes of these characters who themselves experience it secondhand, refracted through the lens of a TV screen, a newspaper report, the thought of an estranged loved one whom the tragedy may or may not have affected.

The book announces its thematic concerns at the very epigraph, with a quote from the Godard film, Pierrot Le Fou. A woman bemoans about a news report on the radio: “They say 115 guerrillas [died], yet it doesn’t mean anything, because we don’t know anything about these men, who they are whether they love a woman, or have children, if they prefer the cinema to the theater. We know nothing. They just say … 115 dead.”

So we are not dealing here with the 6,434 lives that the earthquake took; we are dealing with the one-hundred million Japanese people who did not get affected--or, rather, we are dealing with the very notion of "getting affected." When a stone is thrown in the water, there is a ripple effect: we are looking at the outer ripples, those whose wavelengths are hardly discernible in the water surface.

We are not dealing with the family whose son died. We are dealing with the man reading an article about mounting death rates. The son is not mentioned in the article—“they just say… 115 dead.” 

In other words, we are referring to most people. Those who sift through images of violence and death every day, who can choose to be obsessed with images of death, or can choose to shrug them off, but who otherwise must process them in their own way. And are unavoidably affected by them. We experience the tragedy tangientally, peripherally: it stops us on our tracks for a few seconds, and then life goes on. Murakami examines the strangeness of this fact. Just what this means--this is the territory that Murakami's stories explore, with empathy and descriptive preciseness that is nonetheless always suggestive, always implicative of many meanings, and thus of the complexity of human behavior. 

With this in mind, we can understand why the short story collection was a better choice to tackle this subject than the novel. A novel would have undoubtedly given too much attention to the earthquake, too many paragraphs. It would have too obviously pointed at how this earthquake unites these characters. But in a short story collection, the earthquake appears as a chord, or a note, or a tangent, in each story. To continue the musical metaphor, the earthquake is a chord that strikes every now and then, coloring each tale; the reader takes note of the pattern this creates in the book as a whole, the repetition and variation of the earthquake-chord—as pure image, as symbol, as theme. With each tale, the chord had a different phrasing, with 7^th-Majors and Minors, with diminished tones, etc. It strikes. It leaves. The song continues.

The earthquake is not the only repeating theme. Indeed, part of the reader’s pleasure derives from spotting these common themes and symbols and images as they sprout out. Sometimes these are concrete images: a stone, a little box. The image may appear as metaphor in one story and as actual thing in another. More frequently, the theme will be emotional: an estranged loved one in Kobe, fatherhood, the media. By repeating such themes and images, I cannot help but think that Murakami meant for us to juxtapose them, to consider them both separately and comparatively. Thus on the one hand, they function as nexuses that bind the stories tightly together; on the other, the juxtaposition of them creates a certain imaginative sparkle, as the rubbing of rocks creates fire. One’s understanding of a symbol in one story will enrich  one’s understanding of the same symbol used in another story.

One should, then, feel uneasy when one calls the book merely a collection of short stories. For the book subtly carries the wholeness of a novel; in nudging us to juxtapose the stories, Murakami is already daring us to experience the book as a whole rather than just as the sum of its parts. Isn’t that novelistic?

All these literary machinations serve what is ultimately a very moving book. Murakami has a way of creating vivid and endearing characters, even in the most bizarre of circumstances. As in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, one encounters the bizarre, the comic, and the tragic all in one same moment. (This is especially the case in “super-frog saves tokyo,” a story whose denouement, I will admit, caused quite the tearful knot to form in my throat).  In other words, this book does what all great fiction does: it indulges our imagination and our empathy muscles. Or rather, it exercises the latter through the former, the former through the latter. 

I am purposefully remaining vague re: storylines and such because, of course, I want you to read this book, go on the adventure for yourself. I feel like have done enough harm spoiler-wise with what I’ve already said. If you have already read the book, I welcome your comments on it; if you’re going to spoil stuff, please warn the reader.