After the Quake; Haruki Murakami

Readers, bear with me as I churn out yet another Murakami post. The reason for this though, outside of my just enjoying everything he’s written, is that I read once that spending the time to understand one writer inside and out, comprehending how they develop their own nuances and idiosyncratic styles, is a great way to increase appreciation for other writers as well. Hence my taking the time to reread the oeuvre he has completed to date. After the Quake was the next chosen because I had previously enjoyed his novels more than his short stories, but Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman opened up new areas in Murakami’s writing for me and I wanted to continue down those paths.

What became most apparent was a dualism in the characters, made from those that live lives of internal emptiness and those overly consumed with the weight of a past pain, the ideal being a life between the two that finds emotional substance but allowing fluidity and openness. For an example, we see in the first story, 'UFO in Kushiro', the problem of emptiness, as shown with the icons of modernization and a Hi-fi equipment salesman that delivers a small, light-weight, box (which we can assume has nothing in it) to the cold, northern town of Hokkaido after his wife walks out on him. For the other half, lives weighted with past, painful experiences, there are stories like 'Thailand', about an older woman who works as a physician and while vacationing outside of Bangkok, learns to begin to move on after going through a bad divorce in her adult life and the losing her father during childhood.

I found all of these stories to contain an unambiguous and necessary emotional tone, making for one of the more grounded works by Murakami. This is likely as a result of the inspiration for the collection being the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which, along with the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack, resulted in Murakami’s return to his native Japan after teaching at Princeton in the early 90’s. I liked these so much that I would pair it with The Wind Up Bird Chronicle when suggesting what his best books might be.

In a related note, while doing some quick searches, I found that one of the stories, 'All God’s Children Can Dance', is being made into a U.S. film by director Robert Logevall. Watch the trailer here. I refrain for any further thoughts regarding until after seeing the film, however, I will share that one of my favorite excerpts from the book comes from that story:

"Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another. All God's children can dance."