After the Quake: Stories (Paperback)

Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West's favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in After the Quake are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of Jules and Jim. There's a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." With language that's never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There's no turning back for his people; there's only before and after the quake. --Claire Dederer --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.

The six stories in Murakami's After the Quake are set in the month between the Kobe earthquakes that killed 3,000 people in 1995 and the Tokyo subway gas attacks. While none of Murakami's characters are directly affected by the tragedy, their lives are changed because of it: regrets rise to the surface, absences are revealed, nightmares unleashed. In "Honey Pie", a child's fear of the "Earthquake Man" brings a young story-writer to declare his love for the girl's mother. After spending "[five] straight days in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways," the wife of a stereo salesman in "UFO in Kushiro" leaves her husband with only a note that begins: "The problem is that you never give me anything… you have nothing inside you that you can give me." In "Thailand", a menopausal doctor imagines a former lover's house in Kobe flattened and his family on the street: "When I think of what you did to my life, when I think of the children I should have had, it's the least you deserve."
Never before has Murakami's playful metaphysics been so grounded in everyday hurt and disappointment. Gone are the funhouse creatures, the dancing dwarves and vanishing elephants populating his other stories—well, almost. At its outset, "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" has the cartoon charm of classic Murakami: A bank officer comes home to find a six-foot-tall frog. This frog, who drinks tea and quotes Joseph Conrad, needs the bank officer's help to fight a giant Worm residing beneath the bank; if he doesn't help, the Worm will destroy Tokyo with another earthquake. On closer inspection, it begins to look—though it doesn't really matter—as if the bank officer is actually hallucinating. It becomes apparent that Murakami has written a stunning and sly critique of contemporary Japan, about a put-upon loan officer thanklessly toiling in the aftermath of the freespending "Bubble economy."
Not coincidentally, After the Quake is Murakami's first book, at least in English, written in the third-person, and it demonstrates the remarkable growth of a writer who once said "he wasn't so interested in people." The detachment of Murakami's early work has worn itself out; in its place is a tough-minded reverence for the connectedness of people and places, and the strange ties between dreams and reality. His once fascinating Everyman has grown to include every "normal" body.
Kevin Chong (Books in Canada) --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.