I’m very glad that the New Yorker chose to reprint Haruki Murakami’s story “UFO in Kushiro” in their March 28th issue, because ever since the earthquake in Sendai I’ve been thinking about Murakami’s collection After the Quake
I’ve been thinking about the collection because it helps me to understand what happened in Japan. Even though it’s incredibly painful to witness a disaster of that magnitude, I believe in the power of Literature — or, more broadly, art — as a way of offering consolation and comprehension (I think religion also offers answers, but that’s for another post).
I don’t have much to offer the quake survivors, but I offer Murakami. I think he has more to offer than you’d expect. Some narratives, more simplistic narratives, give trite answers to deep questions — journalistic stories often prey upon pathos to elicit cheap elation when people are rescued after nine days — but Murakami’s narratives make me plumb the mysteries of existence and self in a way that transports me through the tragedy.
In UFO, the quake leads the husband to discover an emptiness inside himself. In the Oedipal “All God’s Children Can Dance,” Yoshiya ends up without any answers about the identity of his father, but chooses to dance in the face of uncertainty. In “Thailand,” a woman worries that her thirty-year hatred for one man caused the quake. Throughout all the stories, the protagonists are recognizing the seismic events as internal as well as external.
One of my favorites is “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.” The plot is surreal. A man-sized Frog asks a banker, Katagiri, for help stopping a gigantic post-Kobe earthquake which will be caused by a monstrous Worm. The surreal characters are hardly arbitrary — consider that the Japanese dealt with the aftermath of WWII atomic weapons by creating Godzilla. Frog and Worm are Murakami’s Godzilla, his mythical monsters to reify the tragedy.
What I love is how Murakami marries the grand public events (the earthquake) to personal events (Katagiri is shot because he’s trying to recover loan money from organized crime syndicates after the housing bubble burst). Frog’s public mission of stopping the earthquake mirrors the personal objective of stopping Katagiri from being shot by a thug working for the syndicate.
If I haven’t convinced you to read the story yet, Frog is wonderfully literate, referencing Anna Karenina, Joseph Conrad, Dostoevsky and Hemingway. If you’re resistant to gigantic animals, his literacy will win you over. But seriously, despite the humor in this collection, Murakami makes you think about quake survivors in a way that deepens your understanding of the quake rather than cheapening it. Despite the horror I feel in the face of the disaster, Murakami offers a measured, wise hope.
