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After the Quake

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After the Quake

By: Haruki Murakami
Narrated by: Adam Sims, Rupert Degas, Teresa Gallagher
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Brought to you by Penguin.

For the characters in after the quake, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago.

Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm.

'When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes,' says Frog. 'And right now he is very, very angry.'

© Haruki Murakami 2000 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Anthologies & Short Stories Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism Short Stories World Literature Magic Natural Disaster
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Critic reviews

In a dance with the delights of Murakami's imagination we experience the limitless possibilities of fiction. With these stories Murakami expands our hearts and minds yet again
Ushers the reader into a hallucinatory world where the real and surreal merge and overlap, where dreams and real-life nightmares are impossible to tell apart...this slender volume, deftly translated by Jay Rubin, may serve as a succinct introduction to his imaginative world...Lewis Carroll meets Kafka with a touch of Philip K. Dick
Dazzlingly elegant...In a world where even the ground beneath our feet can't be relied on, imagination becomes less of a luxury and more of a duty. It's an obligation that Murakami is busily making his raison d'etre, to our very great advantage
In the world of literary fiction, Haruki Murakami is unquestionably a superstar...Many critics have touted Murakami for the Nobel Prize. If he can stay on this kind of form, he could be in with a chance
Murakami is a unique writer, at once restrained and raw, plainspoken and poetic
A neat, yet somehow insanely generous collection..ruthless honesty, a faintly feminine openness, a seeming ability to find beauty and even glory in the banal, the urban, the modern... [the story] 'Honey Pie' isn't just a love story. It's a piece of writing about the threads and snags of time, the tangles, the way things pan out and why. I couldn't even begin to explain why I find it quite so moving and, in a sense, that's Murakami's magic. He speaks to a place so deep inside us that we can scarcely even reply
Beautifully nuanced stories, realistic snapshots of modern Japan enclosed in a fictional world that is seemingly trivial, but loaded with portent
A really imaginative collection where all the stories are intertwined and mysterious in that Murakami way
Murakami's storytelling inspires intimacy. It's the particular kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange. (JANE MENDELSOHN)
Even in the slipperiest of Mr Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out warm with life.
All stars
Most relevant
After the Quake is a series of stories very loosely tied to the 1995 Kobe earthquake. In some stories, the earthquake is simply mentioned in passing whereas in others, it’s more central. Contrary to what one may expect, the stories don’t particularly reflect real thoughts of the Japanese people in response to the earthquake itself (thoughts on solidarity, memory of the dead etc). Rather the earthquake appears either symbolic in meaning or the spark that ignites change for characters at crossroads in life.

Regardless of whether the earthquake is important or not, we have here a collection of compelling reads in various styles that showcase the different facets of Haruki Murakami. Given the quality on offer for such a small commitment of time, After the Quake is perhaps the best starting point for any reader wanting to get to know this incredible author.

A great starting point into the world of Murakami

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