Grief

After the Quake is, first and foremost, a meditation on grief, and its structure even implies an overt reckoning with the famous "stages" of grief. The loose connecting thread for the stories in the collection is the emotional response to the earthquake in Kobe, which has inherently caused ruptures, losses, and resurfacing of pain in the lives of each of the collection's central characters. Every one of these characters is in some way afflicted with grief; Komura has been left by his wife, Junko has run away from home, Yoshiya feels abandoned by his absent father, Satsuki has gone through a divorce, Katagiri has spent his life working for a family that does not appreciate him, and Junpei has spent his life in love with a married woman. Murakami is interested both in the strategies these characters develop for staving off this grief and in the...