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. 

Crying at the Supermercado

In the year 1994, Rolandito Salas Jusino was born. I was four that year. He was four when he disappeared.

In other words he was by himself in the community park and he was four and he had mousy ears and he was four and he was light-skinned and he was four and he smiled through many milk carton photographs and he smiled frozenly, smiled frozenly four, in many news reports and in many news hours and news half hours and news quarterly reports and commentary sessions and black and white El Nuevo Día Puerto Rico’s Finest Newspaper shots and in many Front Page color shots—smiling frozenly four: a smile that’s fit to print, frozen into the year 1999, his eyes emanating from some center, his eyes in print and in monitor seeing the eyes seeing him on the milk cartons and the reports and the television screens and the FBI Missing Persons page.

He was called Rolandito like I was called by my parents and my grandparents. But this is about Rolandito not about me, this is about a four year old, actually no it’s about something else, it’s not about 1999 when he was 4 and I was 8, it’s about 2000 when I was a little older, a little young but still a little older, and Rolandito was still four even though he might have been older too, because he was frozen.

I was nine maybe and I was in a classroom with drawings of test tubes on the walls and it was always hot in there we were talking, I think maybe we had gone off-topic and the off-topic topic was done with and we were just talking about something off the off-topic, and I don’t know how it was brought up, conversation-wise, but I know that it all started with a raised hand, the raised hand of a boy, a boy named Christian, or that’s how it starts for me in my memory anyway, with the teacher looking at a seat behind me, me turning my head to see the raised hand of Christian, the athletic boy who never let me play volleyball, who always had an it-wasn’t-me face.

He said, “Missi,” as in Missus, pronounced Mee-See—he said “Missi,” as in Teacher, as in Maybe You Have The Answer Because I Didn’t Ask My Mom Because I Don’t Ask My Mom Things Like This—he said with his hand up, “Missi,” and Missi said, “Yes?” “Missi, I was in the supermercado the other day, I was with my mom, and we were at the cashier’s box, paying, I mean I wasn’t paying but my mom was,” and the lighting was fluorescent and pale and people always look gray then, “and two aisles ahead, I saw Rolandito’s mom.”

Rolandito’s mom, unlike Rolandito, was not frozen, and the year 1999 ended and 2000 began and time continued for her and the only way Rolandito grew for her was through those digitized age progression pictures. Or that frozen one.

“I saw Rolandito’s mom,” Christian said, “and I didn’t get it, Missi.” And then Missi said, “What didn’t you get, Christian?” And Christian said, “Well, it’s just,” and he even rolled his eyes a little bit, because he knew it was very obvious, “it’s just that she wasn’t crying.”

And so Missi, middle-aged and attractive, Missi who had her own daughters and her volleyball body and her volleyball career and her volleyball hotness and who taught science and who had a great ass even though I didn’t know about great asses then or if I did I wasn’t aware on the “Look She Has A Great Ass” level—Missi with the great ass said, “Well, Christian, life goes on.”

Now we were all confused: how can life go on? She expanded: “We can’t always be crying in the supermercados and the supermalls and the supermax and the wal mart,” she said or something like that, “we need to do what we need to do. Believe me, Rolandito’s mom had had a lot of time to cry. And maybe she still does, but not in the supermercados. It’s okay not to cry at the supermercados.” But Christian still didn’t understand, I could tell. 

I didn’t understand it either.