After the Quake
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  • Published: 10 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448103645
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

After the Quake

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Apr 2003
EBook
10 Oct 2011
Audiobook
11 Mar 2021
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Tales of upheaval and confusion, longing and love in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake

Tales of upheaval and confusion, longing and love in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake.

For the characters in after the quake, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away.

Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm. 'When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes,' says Frog. 'And right now he is very, very angry.

'In a dance with the delights of Murakami's imagination we experience the limitless possibilities of fiction. With these stories Murakami expands our hearts and minds yet again' The Times
  • Published: 10 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448103645
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144
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About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
Kafka on the Shore
Norwegian Wood
A Wild Sheep Chase
Dance Dance Dance
Desire
Birthday Girl
See all

Praise for After the Quake

A neat, yet somehow insanely generous collection..ruthless honesty, a faintly feminine openness, a seeming ability to find beauty and even glory in the banal, the urban, the modern... [the story] 'Honey Pie' isn't just a love story. It's a piece of writing about the threads and snags of time, the tangles, the way things pan out and why. I couldn't even begin to explain why I find it quite so moving and, in a sense, that's Murakami's magic. He speaks to a place so deep inside us that we can scarcely even reply

Daily Telegraph

A really imaginative collection where all the stories are intertwined and mysterious in that Murakami way

Observer

Beautifully nuanced stories, realistic snapshots of modern Japan enclosed in a fictional world that is seemingly trivial, but loaded with portent

Independent

Dazzlingly elegant...In a world where even the ground beneath our feet can't be relied on, imagination becomes less of a luxury and more of a duty. It's an obligation that Murakami is busily making his raison d'etre, to our very great advantage

Guardian

Even in the slipperiest of Mr Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out warm with life.

New York Times

In a dance with the delights of Murakami's imagination we experience the limitless possibilities of fiction. With these stories Murakami expands our hearts and minds yet again

The Times

In the world of literary fiction, Haruki Murakami is unquestionably a superstar...Many critics have touted Murakami for the Nobel Prize. If he can stay on this kind of form, he could be in with a chance

Scotland on Sunday

Murakami is a true original and yet in many ways he is also Franz Kafka's successor because he seems to have the intelligence to know what Kafka truly was - a comic writer.

Sunday Herald

Murakami is a unique writer, at once restrained and raw, plainspoken and poetic

Washington Post

Murakami is one of the best writers around.

Time Out

Murakami's storytelling inspires intimacy. It's the particular kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange.

JANE MENDELSOHN, Village Voice

Ushers the reader into a hallucinatory world where the real and surreal merge and overlap, where dreams and real-life nightmares are impossible to tell apart...this slender volume, deftly translated by Jay Rubin, may serve as a succinct introduction to his imaginative world...Lewis Carroll meets Kafka with a touch of Philip K. Dick

New York Times