After the Quake

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It is no great leap to hear that desire of the author’s reflected in the coda to the final story, “honey pie. With descents into subways, wells, and pits, Murakami’s previous works had been preparing the way for ATQ, dramatizing the fracture between what is seen and unseen, and exploring how the veneer hiding one from the other can suddenly crack apart.

Yet these two disasters, followed by that public display of violent revenge, felt like a door swinging open to something new and unrecognizable. I discovered his work and read several in a row before I branched out looking for other authors from Japan. Sala’s questions were always sharp and interesting, and while he was thinking about them he could also come up with new twists to the story. Random but persistent streams of clear light and white smoke swirled together inside his eyes, which gave him a strangely flat view of the world. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box.

Komura, an early-thirties salesman living in Tokyo, comes home from work five days after the quake to find that his wife of five years has left him. The snake will look very frightening, but in fact it can do you no harm, so you must not be frightened. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. He taught at the University of Washington for eighteen years, and then moved to Harvard University, from which he retired in 2006. Murakami’s most famous novels deploy an enormous range of American and global pop culture references.

A businessman arrives home to discover a giant frog in his house who informs him that he needs help defeating a giant worm who wants to cause another earthquake. It became a catalyst for individuals to reassess their lives with unexpected consequences for themselves and their families and friends around them. This short collection of six stories - few of them taking more than 15 minutes to read - take their origin from the devastating earthquake that hit Kobe in Japan not long ago.There is something written on the stone, but she cannot read it because it is in Japanese: small black characters of some kind. Nella prima metà Murakami sbanda paurosamente tra deragliamenti onirici e non detti che hanno più la parvenza di indecisione circa gli sviluppi da attribuire alle vicende narrate; nella seconda parte, al contrario di qualunque aspettativa, si assiste a una rinascita vertiginosa.

Sayoko turned her head just a bit, and the left hand came out holding a white bra—a small one with no wires. After Shimao apologizes for the joke, Komura lies down again and ruminates about his excursion to Kushiro. How, Murakami asks, can community after the quake be structured around self-reflection rather than cruelty? The title After the Quake immediately suggests that these are stories relating to an earthquake when in fact these are short stories that were written after an earthquake in Japan and are very loosely related at best to the actual quake. In spite of this common characteristic, the stories presented range from the most disparate possible sources: a recently separated man, a young woman who doesn't know what to do with life, a delusional man who can't tell whether he contributed to save Tokyo from another earthquake (just to mention some).While Yoshiya torments himself with a forbidden desire and an uncertain faith, his mother delivers provisions to victims of the quake in Kobe. In this collection of six short stories the relationship of the narrative to the earthquake itself is sometimes clear but at other time obscure. In Kobe, the nearest large city, highways cracked in half, suspension bridges twisted themselves into tight pretzels, and tile roofs fell straight to the ground, with the splintered wood of ancient houses crushed beneath them. Indeed, a good short story should hang over you and linger in your mind, but not all of them were that engaging in their content. A continuum of uncertainty between what is thought to be real and what is thought to be a dream, after the quake is a magnificent to choice to puzzle oneself while reading it.

I loved this collection of six short stories, which he make up my favourite of Murakami's short story books.

The devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995 makes an appearance in all the stories, but only in the periphery.