The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. And then the earthquake struck. Komura's wife follows the TV reports from morning to night: images of flames, smoke, buildings turned to rubble, fires everywhere. Pure hell. For the characters in Murakami's latest short-story collection, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man who destroyed her chances of having children. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Junpei's estranged parents live in Kobe. Should he contact them? Four-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her and everyone else inside a little box. Unappreciated and unpromoted, Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm. "When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes," says Frog. "And right now he is very, very angry."

About the Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. He is the author of many novels as well as short stories and non-fiction. His works include Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, and the most recent of his many international honours is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V.S. Naipaul.

Prizes

Tales of upheaval and confusion, longing and love in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake

Reviews

Noted Japanese author Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart) offers six short stories set around the time of the devastating 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Kobe, which killed thousands in January 1995. The stories are very loosely woven together by passing references made to the tragic event. Focusing on the relationships between people who are all broken by life, the stories include "UFO in Kushiro," in which a salesman comes home one day to find himself abandoned by his wife, who has left him a note and later asks for a divorce; "All God's Children Can Dance," which tells the story of Yoshiya, a man born out of wedlock to a religiously zealous woman (even being told by her that his birth was "divine") who later goes out in search of his father; and "Honey Pie," which describes the longstanding friendships of three college friends, a single man and a married couple, who grow older together wondering about the state of their relationships after the couple's divorce. However, in "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," Murakami uses earthquakes as the central theme; here a giant talking frog shows up in a man's apartment and asks him for his assistance in saving Tokyo from a major earthquake. Murakami's writing examines the state of the human condition in a manner similar to that of National Book Award winner Ha Jin, but Murakami's stories often end abruptly, leaving readers to determine for themselves how the stories are to be resolved, if at all. Public and academic libraries with collections of Murakami's work will probably want to add this one. Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

"Murakami's storytelling inspires intimacy. It's the particular kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange" JANE MENDELSOHN, Village Voice "Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original" JAMIE JAMES, New York Times

These six stories, all loosely connected to the disastrous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, are Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Norwegian Wood) at his best. The writer, who returned to live in Japan after the Kobe earthquake, measures his country's suffering and finds reassurance in the inevitability that love will surmount tragedy, mustering his casually elegant prose and keen sense of the absurd in the service of healing. In "Honey Pie," Junpei, a gentle, caring man, loses his would-be sweetheart, Sayoko, when his aggressive best friend, Takatsuki, marries her. They have a child, Sala. He remains close friends with them and becomes even closer after they divorce, but still cannot bring himself to declare his love for Sayoko. Sala is traumatized by the quake and Junpei concocts a wonderful allegorical tale to ease her hurt and give himself the courage to reveal his love for Sayoko. In "UFO in Kushiro" the horrors of the quake inspire a woman to leave her perfectly respectable and loving husband, Komura, because "you have nothing inside you that you can give me." Komura then has a surreal experience that more or less confirms his wife's assessment. The theme of nothingness is revisited in the powerful "Thailand," in which a female doctor who is on vacation in Thailand and very bitter after a divorce, encounters a mysterious old woman who tells her "There is a stone inside your body.... You must get rid of the stone. Otherwise, after you die and are cremated, only the stone will remain." The remaining stories are of equal quality, the characters fully developed and memorable. Murakami has created a series of small masterpieces. (Aug. 20) Forecast: The thematic urgency of this collection should give readers an extra reason to pick it up; Murakami's track record will do the rest. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.