Haruki Murakami: After the Quake
After The Quake (2002) by Haruki Murakami
Genre: Fiction, Short Story Collection
My Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Overall Review
This is the fifth book that I have read this year (2021), all of which have been books about Japan or books written by Japanese authors. I gave the previous four books I’ve read pretty high ratings (three five-star ratings and one four-star rating), and I was starting to get the impression that my ratings could be more biased than I would like them to be—because of my love of Japan. However, after reading this short story collection, I was able to expel this suspicion because I wasn’t a fan of this short story collection.
The reason why I picked up this book is that I currently live in Kobe, Japan, and I wanted to know more about what it may have been like to experience one of the biggest disasters involving an earthquake in Japanese history, so I thought that this book was perfect—despite it being fictional. I had read articles and watched documentaries about the disaster, but I assumed that Haruki Murakami could show me a different angle on the subject. To my disappointment, I found the stories underwhelming and not nearly as interesting and well-written as the ones I read in Men Without Women. All six stories included in this book have some relation to The Great Hanshin Earthquake (1995)—referred to as the Kobe earthquake in this book, but some had such little relation that it left me feeling a bit disappointed.
Most of the stories weren’t even set in Kobe. They were usually set elsewhere, but the protagonists would hear about the tragedy on the news and remember that they knew someone located in Kobe—either a family member that they didn’t get along with or an acquaintance they didn’t seem that close to. In all of the stories, none of the characters bothered reaching out to any of the people they remembered, and so there was very little insight into what someone may have experienced in Kobe. If anything, I feel that perhaps Murakami was trying to show how little people outside of Kobe cared about the incident, but I don’t think that was his intention.
The stories in this collection are very short at about 20 pages per story—the last one being the longest at around 30 pages, which turned out to be pretty good. I don’t think that the stories being short are the reason I didn’t like them, since I thoroughly enjoyed Edogawa Ranpo’s short story collection, Tales of Japanese Mysteries and Imagination, where the stories are even shorter and are the best short stories I’ve ever read—excluding The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe and The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle. Although I wasn’t blown away by the stories, as always, Haruki Murakami’s writing style is one of the best. He easily captured my attention, engrossing me in the stories, but some of the stories ended a little too abruptly to my liking, or I wasn’t able to connect with the story or the characters, which led to my overall discontent.
That being said, I did not dislike all of the stories. The last story, Honey Pie, was exceptional. It is, without a doubt, one of my favorite Haruki Murakami short stories that I’ve read so far, but I still wouldn’t recommend the book as a whole. Because I didn’t particularly enjoy this book, the review is pretty short, but below are some resources for those who, like me, want to know more about the Kobe earthquake disaster.
The Great Hanshin Earthquake (1995)
I’ve always been interested in living in Kobe, Japan, and quite recently, I made that dream a reality. Naturally, my interest in Kobe motivated me to look into the details of one of the major earthquake-related disasters in Japan’s history, which, to be honest, was quite frightening—especially for someone who has lived in the States for all of his life where earthquakes are non-existent. Obviously, it wasn’t scary enough to stop me from moving there :)
According to Britannica, the Kobe earthquake of 1995, also called the Great Hanshin earthquake, was among the strongest, deadliest, and costliest to ever strike Japan. It lasted about 20 seconds and registered as a magnitude 6.9 (7.3 on the Richter scale). The estimated death toll of 6,400 made it the worst earthquake to hit Japan since the Tokyo-Yokohama (Great Kanto) earthquake of 1923, which had killed more than 140,000. The Kobe quake’s devastation included 40,000 injured, more than 300,000 homeless residents, and over 240,000 damaged homes, with millions of homes in the region losing electric or water service. Kobe was the hardest hit city with 4,571 fatalities, more than 14,000 injured, and more than 120,000 damaged structures, more than half of which fully collapsed.
Click here to read the full Britannica article.
Below are some documentaries with a lot more information than the articles that I was able to find, so I highly recommend these if you want more depth on the disaster and what went wrong and why. I also included a documentary on the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake that surpassed the Kobe earthquake killing 20,000 people.
Great Hanshin Earthquake (1995)
Great East Japan Earthquake (2011)
Thanks for reading my review! Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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