  Yes, Gonzo reads. Can you believe that? Yes, it is crazy, Gonzo reads for pleasure these days. Anyways, Meghan graciously lent me a book of short stories by urlLink Haruki Murakami titled urlLink After the Quake . The book is a collection of six short stories with each having something to do with the earthquake if Japan in 1995 (thus the title). The stories aren't even directly about the quake in neither Kobe, Japan nor Kobe, Japan itself but about people's lives that are some how affected by the quake.
Now I, yes me, Gonzo, haven't read a great number of books nor have I written a book review since the mandatory shit that I had to endure attending a Catholic high school either but I will try to do something of the sort here. Not necessarily a review but just thoughts. The book is interesting and easy to read, granted it has been translated from it's original language of Japanese to English, to be able to reach a wider audience, the translated work required no effort to read. The flow of the conversation is smooth and natural that one can’t help but compare it to overhearing a conversation. His characters are complex and simple as they go about their issues of loss, love, finding one’s self and a host of other troubles that make his characters real and believable (well except for the freakin FROG). There aren't a lot of characters in his stories; no big crowds to plow through, not a lot of people’s names to remember, no majestic setting; the stories are very centered around the lives of the few characters in each of the stories.
The short journey that happens within each story is enjoyable and sometimes leaves you wanting more. The first story, UFO in Kushiro, is about a salesman and his quest to find what life is after his wife had left him after the quake. She would spend all day and all night pouring over newspapers and watching the news about the Kobe quake till one day, she couldn't take it anymore and she leaves him. She left a note that said "Living with you was like living with a chuck of air. " That just sounds painful and empty. After all of this he decides that he needs a vacation, a nice long vacation.
His boss recommends him to go to Hokkaido to take a small package to a friend. He arrives in Hokkaido and is met by two women. He is clueless on what to do at first about the whole scenario. He still feels somewhat loyal to the wife but soon finds that it’s useless and that he should start living his life again. They spend the night in a love hotel. In a conversation with one of the women that he meets in Hokkaido, Komura, the main character, comes to the realization that he is just starting out on his journey to start his life over again; to find himself and to find meaningful relationships with other people.
This realization gives Komura a sense of relief in that he can finally let go of the past. Like any other normal person who just got out of a long term relationship (in this case he was married), this scares and excites Komura. What’s going to happen now? Who will he meet; what his life is going to be like etc? Good story that leaves you with a feeling of loss and hope. Strange combination but it works out nicely.
The second story, Landscape with a flatiron, is a story about Junko and Miyake. They liked to have bonfires and talk about life. Junko is a young clerk at a local convenience store and Miyake is a man older than Junko who is a struggling artist. This story reminded me of Lost in Translation. Both were dissatisfied with the emptiness that is currently their lives in a small town. It was a sad realization for the both of them that they are living mundane lives with no purpose at all.
Both hope that someday there will be something to live for. In some ways, both are drawn to each other despite the age difference. It’s strange but at the same time comforting that they talk about death together. There seems to be a strange deep bond that is forming between the two of them as the story ends and the quote “Don’t worry. When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling cold. You’ll wake up whether you want to or not.” Both of them will be still be living their lives the same way until it becomes so unbearable that they will eventually have to change something.
Miyake’s dreams of dying suffocating inside a fridge and Junko is already suffocating is her current life of nothingness. I thought it was a sad story because of the lack of direction that their lives are taking and that it’s going to stay that way until it’s so unbearable. What a sad realization. All of God’s Children can Dance is the third story. Yohiya, our protagonist, is the product of a single mother, who is sometimes a little weird and a doctor who had given her abortions after she got pregnant the first two times. After the doctor denied the child as his (he adamantly said that his contraceptive methods were fool proof and that she probably ‘had knowledge’ of another man), Yoshiya’s mother aptly left him and lived alone raising her child.
It’s strange that she would prance around the house naked in front of her son not to mention that he would get an erection when she would crawl into bed with him. As much as he wanted to leave and be by himself, he couldn’t. He recalls the time when he rejected the faith and this gave his mother great grief. He could only imagine what would happen if he had left her. The mother also believes that her son is in fact a child of God (apparently, if you have an enormous wang, you are one of God’s children). Mr. Tabata, a wise character in a story that seems to spin its wheels and get somewhere but really nowhere, says that “this life is nothing but a short, painful dream.” The beginning of the ending of the story (and when the wheels begin to spin, so to speak) begins when he gets a description of who his biological father is and goes to the train station and finds the man that he saw in the beginning of the story.
As his mother described his biological father he saw it in this man’s face. The missing ear, about the right age and the doctor’s bag, everything seemed right. He then waits till the man gets off at his stop and he gets off the train at the same stop. The description of how it’s raining and cold and dark really sets the tone for the ending and how he didn’t get anywhere and he is all alone in this quest in the end. He follows the man to a baseball field and suddenly the man is gone. He feels alone and in the end he is alone, a closure to something that never really started.
The next story is titled Thailand. Here we meet Dr. Satsuki and fly with her to Thailand for a World Thyroid Conference. She has been through a rather nasty divorce and would pretty much like to see her ex-husband dead. She needs a break from her work and decides to spend a week long vacation in Thailand in the care of a private limo driver named Nimit. Nimit has spent a great part of his life living in the shadow of his previous employer, a Norwegian gem dealer. He did everything with him and went everywhere he went (there was a reference that they could have been lovers so there wouldn’t be any love connections between our heroine and the driver here.
) He lived his life for him. He lost his sense of self and is also trying to find it. The same can be said about Satsuki, she is a woman trying to let go of her past so that she can find herself as well as improving her emotional health. Both Nimit and Satsuki are avid jazz lovers. They spent a little bit of time discussing how they learned about jazz and what their favorite songs were. Satsuki is also a swimmer.
Nimit takes her to a secluded athletic club where she can swim away from other people and stay relaxed (her hotel has a pool but there are always people there and she can’t do laps as one could in an Olympic size swimming pool). Nimit senses that something is bothering Satsuki so he brings her to an oracle/fortune teller. The oracle tells her to let go of her ill feelings towards her ex-husband so that she can continue on living her life and find herself once again. She tells Satsuki to hang on to a snake so that it will swallow the white stone that is in her so that she can move forward in her life. Nimit also offers up a few words of wisdom regarding looking forward to dying because “living and dying are of equal value.” The next story is Superfrog Saves Tokyo. It’s about the relationship of Katagiri, a loan collector of sorts and Frog, a six foot “real” frog that only Katagiri can see.
There is nothing lovable, tragic or charismatic about Katagiri. In fact, Frog blatantly comes out and tells Katagiri that he is far from good looking, not eloquent at all, and other people tend to look down upon him. Still, Frog sees a certain strength of character about him that is necessary to help him batter Worm. Frog is just a big frog that walks on its hind legs. Frog confronts Katagiri and asks him to go underground with him to fight Worm. Worm got woken up by the quake in Kobe and now he is mad.
He has been absorbing all these little tremors all these years and now he is ready to unleash the collected fury on Tokyo. This story seems crazy at first but after reading a few pages of it, it becomes believable. The story never gave any details of the alleged fight that happened in his imagination. Maybe his isolation from the world has taken form of the Frog and maybe the whole thing was a dream. Like Frog said, “The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield.
It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats.” Maybe we just imagine our own victories and defeats and that they were never really there in the first place. Could it be that we make up what victory and defeat is on our own? That you can make anything into a victory and consequently a defeat as well? We just made it ours by thinking it’s ours. This is a very strange and bizarre story. Katagiri has trouble discerning if he having a nightmare, a fantasy or just a crazy world.
The author did a good job of conveying how the protagonist was feeling since I too was as confused as Katagiri The last story, Honey Pie, was really the most satisfying of all the stories. It is a beautiful story about friendship, unrequited (but in the end, requited) love and loss. It’s about an odd threesome group of friends: Junpei (shy and quite), Sayoko (intelligent and classy) and Takatsuki (loud and proud) (with Sala as the love child of Sayoko and Takatsuki). Junpei eventually finds himself in the position to claim the woman he loves, when Takatsuki – Sayoko’s husband – leaves for another woman. He has to deal with the fact that he loves this woman and her daughter but he doesn’t know how to deal with it appropriately. He has maintained this secret love for Sayoko all these years even after she had married and bore a child.
There is a point in the story where things were starting to get erotic. He finds that there is so much more to consummating his love for her than just the act of sex. He realizes that he does indeed truly love this woman and her child. This is also strange because the woman that he has loved all through out these years has already been married and had a child with his best friend. It’s very admirable for Junpei to jump in and take responsibility for his love and her love as well as the well being of a child not his own but from his best friend and Sayoko’s ex husband. The following quotations are beautiful.
''I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far,'' Junpei thinks. ''I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love. '' He vows that he will watch over the woman and her daughter, ''even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar. '' The ending to this one isn’t nearly as sad as the others. Perhaps this is when he will finally start to connect with people of a different level. It was beautiful how Murakami made the bedtime story of the two bears and the salmon being gone to reflect the relationship between Sayoko and Junpei.
It was also nice how the two bears are partners and how they never have to be apart. Very Nicely Done Mr. Murakami. Very Nicely Done. I am sure that I probably missed a whole boat load of stuff my apologies. It's just my first attempt to put some of my thoughts of a book into something coherent. 
