After the Quake: Stories (2000 original; edició 2003)

Beautiful, if somewhat strange stories. As a whole they convey a sense of well-being despite the natural order of chaos. I'll miss this as my bedtime story book :) ( )

I loved how the themes of these stories – death, regret, love – carried through in different iterations, making them feel linked together but still separate enough. The final story ended the collection on a hopeful note, that you can make a change when your life gets off track. ( )

Murakami writes at his straightforward best in this collection of six short stories. Using the tragic 1995 Kobe, Japan earthquake as his jumping off point, Murakami beautifully and eloquently captures moments in the lives of a handful of Japanese citizens- none of them actually living in Kobe at the time of the quake- and illustrates how catastrophic events affect us all, even if we are not directly impacted. An unhappy wife becomes obsessed with news of the earthquake and suddenly decides to leave her husband, inspiring him to undertake a spiritual journey of his own. A young man, raised to believe that his father is God, decides to seek out his real father. An overworked business woman takes a much needed vacation and undergoes a spiritual reading that would profoundly change her life. Although none of the characters are directly impacted by the devastation in Kobe, the existential questions that such a disaster raises impacts each of their lives in a compelling and meaningful way.

For the most part, Murakami abandons his surrealistic ways and keeps the stories grounded in reality, with only a hint or two of unexplained weirdness (a Murakami trademark). The main exception is "Super Frog Saves Tokyo", a story about a man who comes home from work to find a giant frog in his kitchen requesting help to save Tokyo from the Worm. Apart from this, the remaining stories occupy a Japan as normal as anything Murakami has written about, portraying the unsettled consciousness of a nation dealing with a disaster of historical proportions.

"After the Quake" may be Murakami at his simplest, but it is also Murakami at his best. ( )

It's a long time since I've read a Murakami, and I'd forgotten how much I love his books. These were beautiful short stories, poignant and complete. He's so good at painting a living portrait with people you can understand almost immediately. I don't know how he does it.

Excellent. ( )

A short Murakami is better than a long Murakami, but not better than no Murakami at all.

I already knew I don't care for Haruki Murakami's work going into this and solely read it because it was once on the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. (I believe it was removed in subsequent editions, which still have the problem of having too much Murakami on them.

Even though most of these stories don't involve magical realism, which is a Murakami hallmark and a genre of fiction I don't particularly like, the stories, I still didn't care for them. The stories are all loosely connected by the earthquake in Kobe, but didn't feel like anything particularly special. ( )