Words Turn into Stone Haruki Murakami’s After The Quake

Abstract

Haruki Murakami’s after the quake (2002) collects six stories that are emotional reckonings of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Suggestive of Kafka and magic realist writing, the finely crafted stories are ruminations over the perennial issues of living and dying and the Buddhist idea of suffering, dukkah. A critique of the malaise and conformism of Murakami’s generation, after the quake approaches a resolution through the equation of one’s psyche and catastrophe. What he suggests through the metaphor of dance is that suffering is mediated by the heart. Yoshiya in “all god’s children can dance” states it thusly: “Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another. All God’s children can dance.”