After the Quake
by Haruki Murakami
Alfred A. Knopf

Haruki Murakami is nothing if not prolific. He's penned novels at a rate of about one every two years for the past 20 years, along with a slew of short stories and Underground, a non-fiction account of the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks. Jay Rubin, a Japanese literature professor at Harvard, has translated much of his corpus into English, and has just published the first American study of the writer, "Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words."

Murakami's work is a thrill to read; it's fun and scary and above all mesmerizing. Like Paul Auster, whom he acknowledges as a major influence, Murakami delves repeatedly into the gray region between what we believe to be hard-and-fast reality and the dreams, mysteries and fears that shake the foundations of that belief. And Murakami posesses a sharp learning curve: Read a handful of his books in chronological order and you'll see a clear progression from dabbler to aesthete to a mind in perfect tune with both the beauty and responsibilities of literature. He's gone from the neo-noir dilletantism of his early works to the deft storytelling whose touching narratives and infinitely complex characters create, in the words of Faulkner, "out of the materials of the human spirit, something which did not exist before."

After the Quake, a collection of six short stories previously published in the New Yorker, Harper's, GQ and other American outlets, is Murakami at his best, both as a writer and as a social commentator. The overriding concern of Murakami's more mature work — such as the novels Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood and the stories contained in After the Quake — is the breakdown of community in modern Japan. All of the stories reference, at least obliquely, the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which Murakami uses as both a literal and metaphorical reflection of the rift he sees growing between Japanese parents and children, husbands and wives, and even everyday strangers.

With the possible exception of "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" (in which a mid-level banker may or may not be imagining a giant, hyperliterate frog), the stories lack Murakami's trademark reliance on the supernatural; his other work is punctuated by disappearances, out-of-body experiences and transmigrating souls, but none of that makes it into After the Quake. Instead, the stories are refreshingly realistic, and the characters — if not down to earth — are at least unlikely to float away either, a la Sumire in Sputnik Sweetheart.

Readers used to a certain amount of the unexplained in Murakami's work will be surprised by the collection's first story, "UFO in Kushiro," a minimalist piece in the line of Frederick Barthelme. Komura, a hi-fi salesman, comes home soon after the Kobe quake to find that his wife has left him. As a sort of consolation, a coworker, Sasaki, gives Komura a ticket to the northern island of Hokkaido, provided he carries with him an unexplained package. Komura delivers it to Keiko, Sasaki's sister; a few pages later he finds himself in bed with her best friend, Shimao. They talk about the soul, and his worry over his lack thereof. She tells him about the time she and a boyfriend had sex in a forest, all the while ringing a bell to ward off bears. Then, when he asks her what was in the package, she replies:

... that box contained the something that was inside you. You didn't know that when you carried it here and gave it to Keiko with your own hands. Now you'll never get it back.

Vintage Murakami. But then, just as Komura finds himself "on the verge of committing an act of overwhelming violence," Shimao adds:

Just kidding ... I said the first thing that popped into my head. It was a lousy joke. Try not to let it bother you. I didn't mean to hurt you.

It's as if Murakami is renouncing his entire shtick, telling readers that, at least for the time being, his metaphysical gambols are taking a back seat to more serious concerns.

The stories that follow are populated by the same sort of characters that dominate Murakami's earlier work, but here they aren't chasing after talking sheep or waking up one morning to find their lovers missing. Yoshiya, in "All God's Children Can Dance," finds himself following a man he thinks is his long-lost father. Satsuki, the divorced epidemiologist at the center of "Thailand," finds herself nursed back to emotional health by an angelic chauffeur while on vacation. Murakami is still concerned with the theme of disappearance, but in After the Quake people leave for painfully familiar reasons — failed marriages, fear of commitment, depression.

The final two stories, "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" and "Honey Pie," go further than the others in not only dissecting the anhedonia and ennui at the heart of contemporary Japan but moving toward a response. It's no small matter that Frog, the (possibly) imagined hero of "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," recites Nietzsche while trying to convince Katagiri, a timid Japanese everyman, to help him battle a giant worm about to wreak havoc on Tokyo; between Super-Frog and Katagiri, Murakami sees no choice — without a renewed sense of purpose and courage, a Nietzschean revolt against the self-annihilation inherent in the Japanese psyche, the culture is doomed.

But it is "Honey Pie," an affecting story about a trio of grown college friends — Takatsuki and Sayoko, married with a child, and Junpei, a lonely writer — who find themselves tectonically shifting from the loose dalliances of youth. Takatsuki leaves Sayoko after an affair; Junpei, who has long maintained a secret love for Sayoko, moves in to fill his friend's place. But what he wants to be erotic turns out to be so much more, a deep abiding love for both mother and child he neither foresaw nor knows how to handle. And yet, by accepting the responsibilities of such love, he exhibits the sort of everyday courage that Murakami prescribes for Japanese culture writ large.

At only 181 small pages, and with large, wide print to boot, After the Quake is more like an EP, though at $21, an LP price — and some readers will be put off by how quickly it goes by. But there's so much packed into those pages, so much heart and sadness and longing, so much insight into modern Japan, that it's likely most won't notice. It may take only a day to read, but After the Quake will leave readers thinking for a long time afterward.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)