On Shaky Ground

Haruki Murakami remains one of the most accessible Japanese writers for Western readers. His works give us little of the feeling we have when reading Yukio Mishima or Yasunari Kawabata--that we are entering a new world in which our expectations of how people should think or behave must be suspended.

Murakami’s characters, by and large, are easygoing people, fully engaged in contemporary international culture. They drink Scotch, listen to jazz and rock, vacation in Paris or Hawaii, read Jack London and John Updike. Their concerns are ours: sex, love, jobs, family relationships, making sense of the world.

True, the world in Murakami’s novels, such as “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Dance Dance Dance,” has pockets of surreal mystery, and making sense of it isn’t easy. The six stories in “After the Quake” are all related to the catastrophic Kobe earthquake of January 1995--not through the direct experience of victims but through the tremors that are felt, the cracks that open, in the lives of people seemingly at a safe remove. Americans should have no trouble empathizing with them after the shocks of Sept. 11.

Moreover, Jay Rubin has translated these stories into a smooth, decidedly American English, so cultural barriers are minimized. We enter each tale confident that we’re on firm ground until, under the characters’ feet and ours alike, it gives way.

In “UFO in Kushiro,” a woman obsessed with earthquake coverage on TV leaves her affable husband, claiming he has “nothing inside.” When a new lover he encounters on a trip to the northern island of Hokkaido jokes about this, he finds himself for a moment “on the verge of committing an act of overwhelming violence.” In “Landscape With Flatiron,” a young woman who has dropped out of school and left her family to live on the opposite coast from Kobe with a thuggish surfer is drawn to an older man, an artist, who builds bonfires on the beach. What begins as a friendly meeting at night to view the flames turns into a double-suicide pact.

“All God’s Children Can Dance” features a young Tokyo man whose mother, a convert to Christianity, told him as a child that he had no father but God, and only belatedly indicated that he may in fact be the son of a doctor who advised her about contraception in her wild years. The young man thinks he sees that very person and follows him on the subway, by taxi and on foot. The pursuit, typically for Murakami, seems to pass through a wrinkle in reality and ends on a deserted baseball diamond.

In “Thailand,” a Japanese doctor vacationing at a Thai resort, hears of the quake and hopes that a lover who betrayed her 30 years ago has been killed. Instead, she must learn from her Thai guide that carrying grudges won’t keep her from growing old. “If you devote all of your future energy to living,” he tells her, “you will not be able to die well.” The last two stories deal with the quake by means of fairy tales--for what good does reason do, Murakami seems to ask, in a country perpetually threatened by quakes and volcanic eruptions?

In “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” that city-- site of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which killed more than 100,000 people--is indeed saved from a post-Kobe disaster by a 6-foot amphibian and his unlikely ally: a short, skinny banker who has grown tough trying to collect bad loans after the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble of the 1980s.

“Honey Pie” also has an optimistic ending. The quake follows the breakup of a once-happy couple, and it impels their best friend, a short-story writer who let his handsomer, more assertive buddy claim the woman in college, to declare his own love for her. He does this obliquely by telling stories about lovable bears to calm her 4-year-old daughter, who has nightmares that an Earthquake Man is stuffing her into a box. “I want to write stories,” he says, “that are different from the ones I’ve written so far.”