After The Quake

More Murakami!

I don't know why, but I get immensely more pleasure out of reading short stories than I typically do from a novel. Probably it has something to do with a withered attention span, but there's also something to be said about the foundational differences in form. George Saunders has spoken about this when explaining why he's not written a novel (coming closest with his novella The Brief and Terrifying Reign of Phil) -- a novel requires the author and reader to cope with exposition and narrative development that might be less than captivating in and of itself in order to reach its end and tell a larger, more sprawling tale. Short stories, by comparison, are not unlike jokes in that they are necessarily pared-down, precisely-worded prose pieces who say precisely what they need or want to say and then get out. Late in After the Quake, Murakami focuses one of the book's more beautiful stories on Junpei, a writer of short stories whose simple desires and relative contentment mirrors his limitations as a writer -- he has no patience or stamina to work on a novel, being much more suited to churning through a rigorous weeklong process as he obsessively pummels out short stories. That sounds about right.

In any event, this is all an overly wordy preamble to say that I really loved After the Quake. While, as a collection of linked short stories (linked by the resonance of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, viewed at a distance throughout), it lacks something of the narrative sprawl and immensity of Kafka on the Shore, here Murakami's fascinations and meditations are clearer for their brevity and concision: we see the same dreamlike awakening of adolescent sexuality, the same uncomfortable overtones of incestuous lust, a willingness to blast free of the quiet, simple world of realism (most dynamically in "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," with a dreamworld whose significance outstrips that of the real world.

The bulk of the pieces act as character studies -- "Thailand"'s Satsuki, brooding furiously over an ex-husband and her decision not to have his child; Junpei's passive acceptance of his circumstances at the expense of his happiness, bland businessman Yoshiya's acceptance of his potentially divine ancestry, and on and on. They're nuanced, surprising and intimately crafted -- no note rings false, even when (as in "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo") we're seeing character revealed in how a mild-mannered loan collections agent copes with the arrival of a giant frog urging him to wage war with Worm, who plans to cause an earthquake in Tokyo.

Murakami has a gift for the long form, but it's nice and refreshing to catch small pieces like this, whose simplicity highlights his skills and the deep, moving soulfulness that lies beneath them. There will be much more Murakami as this year moves along...