All Shook-Up

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Katagiri is a 40-year-old loan collector who gets no respect. Until a human-size frog, over green tea in Katagiri's Tokyo apartment, exhorts him to engage in mortal combat with a gigantic, destructive worm kilometers beneath the city center. Katagiri doesn't think he has it in him. The frog persuades him otherwise.

So begins a tale in Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, a collection of six stories set in Japan immediately following the 1995 earthquake that ravaged the city of Kobe and gave a psychic jolt to the entire nation. In Murakami's novels, including A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, a normal guy often experiences a life-changing event, usually with the help of some fantastical device. Ultimately, his struggle is psychological, and so it is in these short stories. Katagiri, for instance, needs giant insects to help him realize he must battle his personal frustrations before they destroy him.

Murakami's fiction, which has sold millions of copies to under-30s in his homeland and made him the West's favorite Japanese writer, has always been about such epiphanies. The 1995 Kobe earthquake looms in the background of these stories: none are actually set in Kobe, but none would have occurred without the disaster. (It is the earthquake, for instance, that awakens the worm in Super Frog Saves Tokyo.) Some of the characters in After the Quake are allowed to find true love or happy endings, but there's a wicked twist in that notion. All six stories take place after the earthquake—but before the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo three months later, an event as fantastic as anything ever imagined by Murakami. If there's a sequel to this set of stories, it's going to get even weirder.