61 pages • 2 hours read
Haruki Murakamiafter the quake
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Kobe Earthquake
At 5:46 am on January 17, 1995, a massive earthquake measuring 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale (7.2 on the Richter scale) struck Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The Kobe earthquake, officially known as the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Disaster, lasted approximately 20 seconds and killed over 6,000 people, injured over 40,000, and left more than 300,000 displaced. Kobe, Japan’s seventh largest city with a population of 1.5 million people, located 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the epicenter, was the hardest hit city. The quake damaged highways, subways, pipelines, the port of Kobe, and commercial and residential buildings. Fires and outages of essential utility services like water, gas, and electricity exacerbated the devastation. The psychological aftershocks of the quake included “emotional numbness, the loss of the sense of reality, [and] an abnormal sense of time” (Shinfuku, Naotaka. “Disaster Mental Health: Lessons Learned From the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake.” World Psychiatry, vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 158-59). The Kobe earthquake was Japan’s second deadliest earthquake in the 20th century, preceded by the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake.
Haruki Murakami was living in the United States when the earthquake struck. Murakami was born in Kyoto and lived near Kobe, in Ashiya, as a youth before moving to Tokyo for college. His parents lived in Ashiya; unable to return to their damaged home after the quake, they resettled in Kyoto. In his essay “A Walk to Kobe,” Murakami writes about a 15-kilometer walk he took from Nishinomiya to Kobe in May of 1997, two years after the quake. He addresses the earthquake’s aftermath, the city’s reconstruction, and his own sense of loss and detachment from a place he once called home. While viewing a serene landscape of the beach and of families on vacation, Murakami was struck by the ordinariness of the day’s pleasures juxtaposed against the historic devastation of the earthquake. He writes, “A part of those violent tendencies lies hidden right below our feet, while another part is hidden within us” (Murakami, Haruki. “A Walk to Kobe.” Granta, vol. 124, 2013). The stories in after the quake harbor a similar mood of the mundane and serene, with an undercurrent of disturbances and disquiet rippling beneath the surface, ready to erupt.
Publication Context: Related Publications
All the stories in the English translation of after the quake originally appeared in different publications. In 2001, “Ufo in Kushiro” and “Honey Pie” were published in The New Yorker, “Thailand” appeared in Granta, and “All God’s Children Can Dance” appeared in Harper’s. In 2002, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” was published in GQ, and “Landscape With Flatiron” appeared in Ploughshares.
In his essay “A Walk to Kobe,” Murakami discusses the setting of the stories in after the quake as the month in between the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack. Haunted by the role of latent violence in the two events, Murakami returned to Japan in the summer of 1995 and conducted interviews with people who survived the gas attacks. The interviews and an essay by Murakami were collected in the nonfiction book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2000), originally published in Japanese as Andāguraundo in 1997. In “A Walk to Kobe,” Murakami remarks that the earthquake and the gas attack were twin tragedies that compelled him to understand why they happened and what he could do about it. Underground can be considered a companion piece to after the quake, as Murakami believed that understanding one of the events could help him understand the other. He considers both tragedies as “simultaneously a physical and psychological issue” (“A Walk to Kobe”). Murakami concludes that he never came up with a clear answer to his questions about the events, but his writings serve as a meditation on violence, loss, and a path to understanding.
Related Titles
By Haruki Murakami
