On the morning of Tuesday, 17 January 1995, shortly before 6 o'clock, the city of Kobe was hit by the largest earthquake to strike Japan since 1923. During the twenty seconds of shaking that followed, more than five thousand people died, tens of thousands were injured and three hundred thousand were made homeless. At least £100 billion of damage was caused. Haruki Murakami, Japan's most popular living novelist, whose parents' house was destroyed in the earthquake, wasn't in the city. He had left the country in the late 1980s, uncomfortable with the fame that accompanied the huge success of Norwegian Wood (1987), and gone to the United States. The protagonist of each of the six stories collected in After the Quake is someone who wasn't there, but whose life has been profoundly affected by the event, and by their absence from it.

LRB 17 April 2003 | PDF Download