after the quake

after the quake is a collection of six short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The collection was first published in Japanese under the title Kami no Kodomo-tachi wa Mina Odoru (All God’s Children Can Dance) in 2000, followed by Jay Rubin’s English translation in 2002. The stories are set one month after the 1995 Kobe earthquake and focus on the lives of those far from the epicenter yet nonetheless psychologically impacted by the disaster. Murakami’s disconnected characters navigate the author’s trademark surreal and introspective worlds to explore alienation and loss, the fragility of life, and the thresholds of the unconscious. 

Some of the stories in after the quake have been adapted for radio (Simon McBurney’s 2007 BBC Drama on 3 episode), the stage (Frank Galati’s 2007 production), film (Robert Logevall’s 2008 All God’s Children Can Dance), and manga (Jc Deveney’s 2023 and 2024 Haruki Murakami’s Manga Stories 1 and 2). 

This guide refers to the Vintage International 2003 Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, racism, gender discrimination, pregnancy termination, addiction, suicidal ideation, sexual content, and substance use.

Plot Summaries

The six stories in after the quake are set in February 1995, shortly after the Kobe earthquake and one month before the Tokyo subway sarin attack. The stories are told in the third person, a departure from Murakami’s typical first-person narratives, and focus on the melancholic lives of ordinary citizens who are far from the disaster yet brimming with uncertainty and sorrow. Per the author’s instructions, the titles of each story and the collection appear in lowercase in the English translation. The collection begins with two epigraphs. The first is from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), also called The Devils (The Possessed), where Nikolai Stavrogin tells Liza Tushina that she is cruel for dismissing him. The second epigraph is from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou (Pierrot the Fool), where a woman criticizes a radio broadcaster for depersonalizing the dead in Vietnam as a number.

“ufo in kushiro” is about Komura, a 30-something electronics salesman in Tokyo whose wife leaves him after watching news coverage of the Kobe earthquake for five straight days while Komura went about his daily routine. She explains in her note that he is a good man but empty like “a chunk of air” (4). Komura takes a week off from work and agrees to travel to Kushiro to hand-deliver a small box with unknown contents to Keiko, a work colleague’s sister. In Kushiro, Komura meets Keiko and her friend, Shimao, and the women tell him a story about a wife who left her husband and children after a UFO sighting. Shimao joins Komura at a love hotel and tells him a story about the time she and an old college boyfriend had sex in the woods and rang a bell the entire time to ward off bear attacks. She invites Komura to bed and tells him to enjoy himself since life is as unpredictable as earthquakes, UFOs, and bears. Komura tries to have sex but is unable to stay aroused due to visions of the earthquake’s destruction. He confides that his wife called him a “chunk of air,” and Shimao jokes that the box he had delivered and given away to Keiko had contained the “something” in himself that he was missing (20). Komura represses a flash of anger and tells Shimao that he feels as if he has traveled a long way. Shimao tells him that he is just at the beginning.

“landscape with flatiron” focuses on the quiet and melancholic lives of Junko, a young runaway, and Miyake, a middle-aged artist. Junko lives with her boyfriend in the small seaside town of Ibaraki and finds peace in watching Miyake build bonfires with the driftwood he collects on the beach. The flames remind her of Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire” and her high school essay where she argued, to her teacher’s dismissal, that the protagonist sought death. During a midnight bonfire, Junko learns that Miyake is estranged from his wife and two children in Kobe, though he assumes that they are safe from last month’s earthquake. Miyake tells Junko that he has nightmares about being trapped in a refrigerator and suffocating to death. He believes that premonitions stand for something else and can be scarier than reality. He explains that his recent painting, Landscape with Flatiron, is not really about an iron and that some people live in a way that is guided by how they think they will die. Junko confides that she feels empty inside, and Miyake consoles her as she cries. He tells her that they can wait for the fire to burn out and think of a way to “die together” (38). Junko falls asleep, and Miyake tells her that when the fire is out, the cold will wake her up.

“all god’s children can dance” is about Yoshiya, a 25-year-old who lives with his religious mother, Miss Osaki, a single parent who is away on an earthquake aid mission. Yoshiya wakes up with a hangover, and on his commute home from work, he follows a man on the subway whom he thinks may be his estranged father. Yoshiya’s mother had raised him to believe he was a literal son of God, but Yoshiya believes that his biological father was an obstetrician whom his mother had seen for two abortions when she was younger. Yoshiya follows the stranger to an abandoned site surrounded by a concrete wall with barbed wire. He trails the man down smaller, dilapidated passages and emerges on the other side to an open baseball field with no sign of the man. Yoshiya recalls his youth and how he was told that if he remained devout, his father would appear to him. He had prayed to God, his father, to help him catch fly balls to no avail, and he stopped believing in God. Yoshiya thinks about his past feelings of guilt and lust and no longer cares if God or anyone else is watching him. He dances on the baseball mound, kneels, and says, “Oh God.”

In “thailand,” Satsuki is a pathologist from Tokyo who attends a medical conference in Thailand and stays an extra week for vacation. Her guide and driver, Nimit, is a local who arranges a private pool where she can swim alone every day. Satsuki thinks about her divorce and talks to Nimit about her father’s passing when she was young and his love of jazz music. She privately thinks about a man from her past and wishes that he died painfully in the Kobe earthquake. On her last day in Thailand, Nimit takes her to see an old soothsayer who tells Satsuki that she has a hard stone inside her and must get rid of it. She tells Satsuki that she will dream of a snake that will eat the stone for her and that she should be thankful that the man in Kobe is alive and unharmed. On her flight home, Satsuki awaits the dream.

“super-frog saves tokyo” is about Katagiri, a collection officer in Tokyo with a thankless job and no friends. A giant, talking frog named Frog appears in his apartment and recruits Katagiri to help him battle Worm, an underground creature that will cause a destructive earthquake in Tokyo. On the night of the battle, Katagiri is shot in the streets and wakes up in the hospital. The nurse tells him that he was never shot and was found unconscious. Katagiri is unsure if Frog was a dream. Frog appears in his room that night and informs him that the battle was in the imagination and that Katagiri fought bravely to help him prevent the earthquake. Frog dies from his battle wounds and releases a swarm of bugs from his disintegrating body that crawl into Katagiri. Katagiri screams and awakens from his dream within a dream. He tells the nurse that Frog sacrificed his life to save Tokyo and falls back asleep with fond memories of Frog.

“honey pie” follows the life of Junpei, a lovelorn writer who remains close with Takatsuki and Sayoko, his best friends from college. Junpei is in love with Sayoko but defers to the more charismatic Takatsuki. He supports their relationship and subsequent marriage and names their daughter Sala. Junpei remains a dependable fixture in their lives and writes fiction about unrequited love. When Takatsuki and Sayoko divorce, Junpei helps his friends with the transition. Sala begins to have recurring nightmares about the Kobe earthquake, and Junpei tells her stories about bears who are best friends to comfort her. The story ends with Junpei and Sayako rekindling their attraction to each other. Junpei is eager to write stories with happy endings and to ask Sayoko to marry him.