First published 2003
Satsuki has spent thirty years hating a single man. When the 1995 Kobe earthquake strikes, she wonders whether her hunger for revenge somehow called it into being. Miyake walked away from his family in Kobe and now lights bonfires alone on a beach hundreds of miles from the rubble. Fourteen-year-old Sala wakes screaming because the Earthquake Man wants to fold her inside a tiny box. And Katagiri comes home one evening to find a giant frog standing in his apartment, calmly explaining that a massive worm is coiling beneath Tokyo, that the worm causes earthquakes when it rages, and that right now it is very, very angry. These six linked stories move through longing, guilt, grief, and the strange logic of dreams. The earthquake is never just a disaster. For each character it surfaces something they had pressed down and forgotten. Murakami writes the ordinary and the impossible side by side, and the collision is where the real weight lives.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, contemporary, magical-realism, japanese-literature
Vibes: dreamlike, haunting, introspective, melancholic, thought-provoking
Tropes: linked-stories, magical-realism, trauma-processing, unreliable-perception
Setting: Kobe, Tokyo, Japan
Period: 1995
132 pages · Paperback · Vintage
Content warnings: death