The Reading List

"Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they - earthquakes?  We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary.  We even talk about people being 'down to earth' or having their feet planted firmly on the ground.  But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true."
                                                                                  -Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

Two months after the earthquake in Japan, I'm not hearing much about it in the media anymore.  It's strange how an event can appear larger than life for so many days - earth-shattering, literally - and then just fade away, as other more current current events take over.  Perhaps this is what I find so unsatisfying and unsettling about reading the newspaper and watching the news.  But fiction, on the other hand, provides a whole other way of seeing the world, where the everyday details surrounding an event are carefully dissected.  And so, lusting after this kind of reading experience, I picked up Haruki Murakami's After the Quake earlier this week.

In this collection of short stories, Murakami writes about how the 1995 earthquake in Kobe transformed the lives of ordinary people in Japan forever.  What I found so moving about these stories is the way that they don't focus on the most dire instances of suffering; there are no torn limbs or people trapped under crumbling buildings in these stories.  No, Murakami's art is a much more subtle, startling form of grief.  A doctor attending a conference in Thailand curses her estranged ex-husband - half wishing that he died in the earthquake - only to learn from a fortune teller that he is still alive, bringing an unexpected relief to her tormented mind.  A crazy man dreams that a giant frog has saved Tokyo from being destroyed from a quake.  And in my favourite story, a writer comforts the young daughter of the woman he's secretly been in love with for years by telling her whimsical stories about "Masakichi the bear" to distract her from her nightmares about "Mr. Earthquake."  Strangely, the earthquake pulls them all together into a new kind of improvised family.

Although Murakami was writing about the Kobe earthquake, I can't help but see these stories as illuminating the more recent earthquake, too.  And late at night when I, like several of the characters, also cannot sleep, it's comforting to pick up Murakami and get a sense that life in even the most disastrous circumstances carries on, and people manage to find new forms of happiness, however fragile.

Photo from: here