after the quake

In “landscape with flatiron,” Junko is a young runaway who left her family in her teens. She represents isolation, sensitivity, and the difficulties of youth. She experienced harassment both at school and at home. She describes her mocking teacher and peers as “absolute torture” and says that she “couldn’t stand the sight of her father” (28), a man who leered at her inappropriately. Junko’s home life was disheartening, as she was betrayed by the people and social institutions that should have nurtured and protected her.

Junko is a deeply introspective youth who is attuned to the subtleties of artistic expression, such as Miyake’s bonfires and Jack London’s fiction. Unlike her carefree boyfriend, Keisuke, Junko searches for meaning beyond herself and the present moment. She puts herself in the place of people 50,000 years ago before a fire or London’s protagonist in “To Build a Fire.” Junko recognizes a deep part of herself when she watches the flames. She senses a “deep, quiet feeling” that leaves her with a “sweet-sad, chest-gripping, strange sort of feeling” (31). The fire comes to represent primal energies of purification, renewal, and life, and Junko’s attraction to the beauty of the bonfires suggests her resilience amid despair.

Little is revealed about Junko’s personal interests and how she spends her time outside of her job at the roadside mart. The lack of any details about Junko’s present life highlights her mood of exhaustion and emptiness. Other than her seemingly unsatisfying relationship with her boyfriend, whom she calls an “idiot” (33), Junko’s only other interests are her enjoyment of bonfires and literature. Yet the appeal of both hobbies is deeply rooted in her feelings of melancholy.

Junko admires the beauty of Miyake’s bonfire because she recognizes a kindred soul in her friend, with his careful devotion to his art. Although their conversations are dominated by the topic of death, Junko and Miyake’s decision to “die together” is a form of renewal and resilience that acknowledges the hardships that they have endured and their promise to support each other.

In “all god’s children can dance,” Yoshiya is a 25-year-old who lives with his mother and works at a small publishing company. He is introduced with a terrible hangover and in a state of disarray and disorientation that emphasizes the story’s dreamlike tone. Yoshiya awakes with a need to purge himself from his night of drinking. He feels as if a “foul sludge [i]s oozing from his rotting gums and eating away at his brain from the inside” (42). The imagery of internal deterioration and decay serves as a metaphor for an exploration of his psyche, where something inside Yoshiya is making him sick and needs to be expelled. Most of his first waking moments involve ways for him to vomit.

Yoshiya represents the innocence and insecurities of youth and the pressures and confusion of growing up quickly. Yoshiya was raised by a devout mother who used euphemisms for sex to sterilize her language yet was casual with nudity, confusing him. All he wanted from God was the ability to catch fly balls and not let his team down. At 25, his relationship with his mother undergoes a reversal, where Yoshiya acts more like a parent to his eccentric mother. He doesn’t want to leave her alone because “there [i]s no telling what his mother might do if he were to leave her alone. He had devoted vast amounts of energy over the years to preventing her from carrying out the wild, self-destructive (albeit good-hearted) schemes that she [i]s always coming up with” (45). At the same time, the story suggests that taking care of his mother takes its toll, as he seeks relief from his responsibilities in alcohol, often getting so drunk that he doesn’t remember what he did the night before.

Finally, Yoshiya represents the tensions between filial piety and codependency, as he struggles to express his independence without neglecting his mother and duty to God, his supposed father. Unlike some of the other youths in the collection, like Keisuke and Junko in “landscape with flatiron,” Yoshiya is “still unable to tear himself away” from his mother (45). He tells his college girlfriend, “I can’t marry you […] I know I should have told you this, but I’m the son of God. I can’t marry anybody” (59). Yoshiya’s unusual upbringing, in which he was told as a child that he was a son of God, keeps him from developing a sense of self that is free from a looming sense of judgment and punishment from an absolute authority. Yoshiya ultimately has an epiphany of self-discovery when he realizes that his journey to find his father was actually a journey to find himself.

In “thailand,” Satsuki is a pathologist who studies the immune system and the thyroid. Nimit describes her as “a beautiful person […] Clearheaded. Strong” yet carrying a heavy heart (76). Satsuki is a specialist in her field, has worked on Nobel Prize-level research, and is respected by her peers. She has friends and is more social than many of Murakami’s typical protagonists. However, she second-guesses whether she is qualified to consider herself a “doctor” on the plane. Satsuki’s career as a medical doctor who studies diseases is an ironic occupation, as she discovers that what ails her is not something detectable or treatable with modern science and technology. Satsuki’s story highlights the different forms of healthcare and the gap between physical health and mental health.

As the story of an older woman, Satsuki’s story is also a social commentary on ageism and sexism. She thinks about the child she did not want to have and how her husband used that against her to justify his cheating and subsequent divorce. His accusation assumed that she had no value unless she was a mother. The internalized guilt has reared its head as Satsuki goes through menopause, a stage that finalizes her decision not to have a child. She regards menopause as “God’s ironic warning to (or just a nasty trick on) humanity for having artificially extended the life span” (63). Menopause makes her relive her sense of devaluation and obsolescence.

In Satsuki, Murakami creates a character critical of the fact that she was made to feel guilty by her husband for never wanting to have a child and causing her marriage to fail. Satsuki’s malaise stems less from not fulfilling the traditional role of wife and mother and more from the sexist harm caused by that expectation. The metaphorical language of a child “to which she never gave birth,” “destroyed,” and “flung […] down a bottomless well” suggests that the destroyed child is emblematic of her rejection of motherhood (77), and the well symbolizes the social stigma of not wanting a child.

In “super-frog saves Tokyo,” Katagiri is a 40-year-old loan collection officer and fulfills the archetypes of the underdog and antihero. He is a “skinny little man no more than five-foot-three” and has a self-loathing personality (82). He tells Frog that he has no friends or lovers and lists all his flaws without pause. He rambles, “I’m going bald. I’m getting a potbelly. […] My feet are flat. […] I have no athletic ability, I’m tone-deaf, short, phimotic, near-sighted—and astigmatic. I live a horrible life” (93). Almost all the negative traits that Katagiri lists involve physical features, suggesting that his sense of low worth is rooted in society’s prioritization of appearances over substance. Katagiri is a cog in the bureaucratic machine and does everything that no one else wants to do. Although he is a diligent worker at the bank and a supportive sibling, Katagiri never garners appreciation or recognition, and he never complains. He represents duty, passivity, and futility.

Frog functions as Katagiri’s alter-ego and a form of wish fulfillment: In Frog, Katagiri’s flaws are reinterpreted as essential traits that make him “sensible and courageous” (89). Instead of being the perpetual loser, Katagiri fulfills the trope of “the chosen one,” the unique and special person who alone can save the world. Katagiri’s desire for agency is projected onto the fantastic Frog, whose actions have significance and monumental impact. Frog explains that when he threatened Katagiri’s client, his purpose was to prove that he “can take action and produce results” (92). He asserts, “I am a real, living being” (92). Frog is a manifestation of Katagiri’s dehumanized treatment, and by helping Frog in battle, in effect being Frog, Katagiri proves that he, too, is a real and living person worthy of humane treatment.