Haruki Murakami: After the Quake

Reviewed by Kapka Kassabova*

"The Earthquake Man. He came and woke me up. He told me to tell you. He said he has the box ready for everybody. He said he's waiting with the lid open. He said I should tell you that, and you'd understand."

Haruki Murakami is recognised as Japan's most idiosyncratic modern writer and one of fiction's great originals. A cult figure in Japan, he has often fled the limelight to live in the US and Mediterranean Europe - though his fictional setting is almost invariably an anyplace Japan.

People who pick one of his books usually join the ranks of the addicted. This happened to me with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, an imaginative tour de force where a lethargic character is pushed out of his apartment by the double disappearance of his cat and his wife. His drowsy neighbourhood becomes a gateway to an unsettling world where he loses himself and witnesses the horrors of Japan's invasion of Manchuria in World War II, among other things. His adventures have a deadpan humour and breathtaking immediacy.

While this novel assured Murakami international renown (but wasn't so popular in Japan, strangely enough), it was Norwegian Wood that made him a star at home, where it sold over four million copies - unprecedented for an intimate literary novel. It recalls the youth of a man in the 60s and 70s whose unrequited passion for a beautiful but disturbed woman never left him, and each time he hears a certain Beatles song, he is jolted back into the past where the most important emotional events began and perhaps ended.

This is where Murakami's versatile genius lies. He creates fiction in overlapping worlds, which enthrals a huge range of readers. His books roughly fall into two types: the fantastic, surreal and comical twists of off-beat works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Dance Dance Dance, The Elephant Vanishes and A Wild Sheep Chase, populated by eerie events and characters who have no clear sense of self, a vanishing elephant, a man in a sheep costume, human mutants and that leitmotif of Murakami's psychic realm - the disappearing woman. If this sounds too contrived, you will be surprised. The inexplicable is always natural here, the characters just live with it.

"My books offer [my readers] freedom - freedom from the real world," the author comments. Having often fled the suffocating atmosphere of Japanese society, where individualism is hard-earned, as well as the hysteria of celebrity culture, this man runs marathons every year and translates writers such as Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Ursula le Guin and John Irving in his spare time.

Norwegian Wood heralded a new Murakami form - the simple, elegiac display of our search for things lost or invisible. The equally moving and finely tuned South of the Border, West of the Sun followed, where a jazz-bar owner puts his happiness at stake in pursuit of an elusive woman he loved once. Murakami himself owned a jazz bar before he turned to writing, and music finds its way into his stumbling characters' lives as the only meaningful form of communication.

Often his writing feels jazzy, with surprises, lightness of touch and emotional jolts. Sputnik Sweetheart is another intimate novel, and likewise a delicate exploration of loneliness and the need to connect, against all odds.

The slim collection After the Quake is vintage Murakami, maintaining a fine balance between the physical and the metaphysical, the fantastic and the ordinary. While not a milestone, it offers some of the delights of his previous fiction.

The six stories are loosely centred around the devastating Kobe earthquake in 1995, the year he returned to Japan, and also the year of the Tokyo underground gas attack (which led to his reflection on the extremes of anti-conformism, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche).

Nobody in this collection lives in Kobe, yet they are connected to the disaster in some distant but crucial way: Komura's wife becomes obsessed with watching earthquake footage and disappears one day. In his attempt to piece his life together, he goes on a holiday, only to discover that his soul has gone inside a small box.

Katagiri, a Tokyo salaryman with a small life, finds a giant frog in his kitchen who insists on involving him in a heroic battle with Worm. "Worm lives underground. He is a gigantic worm. When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes," Frog said, "And right now he is very, very angry."

The box appears again in the final story, where a girl has nightmares about the Earthquake Man trying to push her inside a tiny black box. Sometimes reminiscent of David Lynch's warped realities, Murakami is much more than a bag of tricks. There is the whispered poetry of Leonard Cohen here, the deep emptiness of Fitzgerald, the desultory dialogues of Raymond Carver, all unfolding to the humming sound of Stan Getz. No kimonos, geishas or bonsai - this is a universal Japan of lost souls, haunting sound-bites for the 21st century.

* Kapka Kassabova is an award-winning poet and writer.

Vintage, $34.99