after the quake - Super-frog Saves Tokyo

after the quake is a collection of six short stories Murakami wrote in response to the catastrophic Kobe earthquake in 1995. The original title 神の子どもたちはみな踊る, Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru means "The children of the gods all dance".

The Kobe earthquake occured in January 1995 with over 6,000 people losing their lives. It was the nation's worst earthquake since 1923. The author, Murakami was in Europe at that time then came back to Japan and wrote these stories as a memorial to victims of this natural disaster, and to people who lost their loved ones. All of the stories are set in February 1995, the month between the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attacks. These stories are not directly connected to the earthquake since none of the story is about a victim or the ones who lost their family and friends, but the emotions of all the stories are simply, and deeply involved with the earthquake.

This book includes UFO in Kushiro, Landscape in Flatiron, All God's Children Can Dance, Thailand, Super-Frog Saves Tokyo and Honeypie. Like his other stories these are all short, seems simply written but captivating and powerful that it needs second, third reading to learn something different everytime. Only one of the stories, "Super-frog Saves Tokyo" contains supernatural elements. I really liked this story which is why I wanted to write about it for the final project of this course.

Katagiri is a loan bank office worker, an ordinary guy with nothing special in his life. One day when he comes home from work he found a giant, men-sized frog. After the thorough observation he realizes that the frog is a real, live frog that's not some fantasy or a scam as he thought. The frog asks him to help fighting with a worm who is threatning to destroy the city of Tokyo. Katagiri refuses to help him, admiting that he's less than an average guy and frog might be better off with somebody else. Eventually frog convinces him and Katagiri agrees to help him. When Katagiri woke up the next day and found himself in a hospital, realizes that it was already one day passed the night he was supposed to help frog confront with the worm. Frog came to visit Katagiri in the hospital, telling him that Katagiri was indeed a great help and frog could only win from the fight with the worm because of Katagiri's support. Exhausted and injured frog slowly falling asleep in front of Katagiri and he knew the frog was dying.

This story has a sense of humor in the beginning, just like other Murakami's stories. But in the end when the frog slowly dies and Katagiri cries for him and wake up with feeling of loss and emptiness, made me feel lost and lonely, like other five stories in this book made me feel after I read them. I think the author was trying share the feeling of emptiness and loss that all the people will have to go through even though they didn't have anything to do with the earthquake. The whole country saw it and mourned, the author did not write about the incident or the victim, but for the nation who lived this generation and experienced this history disaster.

In my opinion, the fact that it wasn't directly about the disaster made it universal and enabled the readers all over the world to relate themselves to the stories.