After the Quake
Haruki Murakami
This is a book of short stories that are all (loosely) connected with the Kobe earthquake of 1995. When the Tokyo earthquake happened earlier this month, I remembered this little book sitting on my shelf and decided to read it. That was kind of a dumb reason to decide to read a book, and indeed it certainly didn’t add anything to my understanding of the current situation. But I always love reading Murakami and this was no exception. As usual, the stories vary in quality, and I find that the unrealistic mystical things that work well in his novels don’t work as well in short stories, since they end up seeming more like a short story gimmick than a component of reality that must be lived with. Far and away my favorite story of the collection is the last one, “Honey Pie”, and I also liked “Landscape with Flatiron”.