July 7th 2005.  I was in central London the day terrorists detonated suicide bombs on three underground trains and a bus.  Fifty-two people were killed and more than seven hundred injured.  What I remember particularly of that terrible day was an image that came to me very suddenly and that has stayed with me ever since: an image of the fabric of daily life being torn by the sudden and indiscriminate violence.  Looking through the ripped fabric, I felt I was looking into a parallel world in which everything seemed more or less familiar, but also slightly and permanently altered.  Feeling secure and safe no longer seemed possible.  In fact, security and safety suddenly seemed like childish ideas, innocent delusions shattered by the bombs as surely as the victims.  For a moment, the proximity of devastating violence created a completely new reality, a reality in which there was no longer a place for innocence.

That glimpse of a new reality cannot be sustained for long.  The thing you see so clearly for a short time through the torn fabric fades.   It’s impossible to live in the new reality because “normal life” repossesses you powerfully, at least until the next devastation rips the fabric once again.  But something small, deep, and fundamental is changed by proximity to death and injury on that scale.  Whatever you catch sight of momentarily through the torn veil – mortality, insecurity, whatever – stays with you and is never wiped away completely.  One’s life is changed, in a way that is perhaps imperceptible to others and inexplicable to oneself but that is real and profound nevertheless.

The small, subtle, almost invisible changes wrought by violence are the subject of the six powerful short stories collected in Haruki Murakami’s After The Quake.  All the stories were inspired by the Kobe earthquake of 1995 in which more than 6,000 people died.  The quake looms in every story, less a backdrop than a malign influence shaping the lives of the characters.  It’s a provocative and transformational force, causing a woman in one story to leave her husband and a man in another to declare love that had been unspoken for years.

The essence of Murakami can be found in these stories.  Here you’ll find in miniature everything that has made him one of the most impressive, distinctive, and admired novelists writing today.  It’s very difficult to isolate what it is that makes his work so compelling for so many readers.  The prose is spare and stripped down.  Reading Murukami, I often find myself re-reading individual sentences trying to discover how something apparently so simple ends up being so distinctive and powerful.  His characters, so precariously and tenuously connected to life and to the world, so vulnerable and so fragile, look to me like heroes in a violent, dangerous, and uncertain world.

“Pay very close attention.  He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him.  That same kind of spirit is inside me, and inside you.  There – you can hear it, I’m sure: the hot breath, the shiver of the heart.”