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In the next several weeks, we'll be bombarded with words and images in every conceivable media format, seeking to commemorate the events of 9/11 and maybe even make a buck in the process. The books have already started to arrive: What We Saw, for instance, a compendium of CBS coverage introduced by Dan Rather and published by Simon & Schuster, featuring "The Events of September 11, 2001—in Words, Pictures, and Video" (included with the book is a DVD of CBS's news coverage).
But maybe some of the best books to mark the occasion, if you are so inclined, will be books that weren't written explicitly for that purpose. One such is Haruki Murakami's slim book of stories, After the Quake (Knopf).
Japan suffered two extraordinary shocks in 1995 in the space of only a couple of months. In January of that year, the port city of Kobe was struck by a devastating earthquake that killed more than 4,000 people and displaced several hundred thousand. The city, much of which had been rebuilt after massive destruction in World War II, lay in ruins. In March, while the nation was still reeling from that disaster, the apocalyptic sect Aum Shinrikyo sought to hasten the end of the world by releasing the nerve gas, sarin, in the Tokyo subway. While only eleven people died, more than 5,000 suffered from exposure to the gas, and the psychological impact on the Japanese people was incalculable.
Murakami, a best-selling Japanese novelist who had been living for some time in the United States, decided to return to Japan. In response to the Aum Shinrikyo attack, he interviewed many victims; he also interviewed current or former members of Aum. The two short books he produced as a result were published in one volume in English translation as Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (Vintage, 2001), reviewed earlier this year in the pages of Books and Culture ["Comparative Terrorism," by Christopher Harmon, March/April 2002].
In response to the quake, Murakami wrote a series of six short stories, each of which is set in February 1995. Published in Japan in 2000 under the title of one of the stories, "All God's Children Can Dance," the book has just appeared in English as After the Quake.
Certain writers have an indefinable gift for expressing the mood of their times. Murakami is one such writer. He has a winsomely quirky imagination that reminds me of the late Richard Brautigan, a taste for the outrageous in the vein of Tom Robbins (less winsome, to me at least), and some of the perversity that is so common in modern Japanese literature (Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, et al.), but more casual, nonchalant. His young people may be Japanese, but they are uncannily similar to many young people in America. Much of what gets called "postmodern" is fleshed out in Murakami's fiction, above all the pervasive sense of arbitrariness and the absence of any stable system of belief.
How does such a writer respond to disaster? After the Quake is Murakami's answer. Running through the stories is dissatisfaction with the unthinking materialism that is so powerful in Japan as well as in the United States. Dreams play a role in many of the stories; there are repeated intimations of other realities, of cosmic conflicts between good and evil (but perhaps the good and evil are somehow intertwined, interdependent). Above all, there are the virtues of love and commitment. The last story in the book concludes:
But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone—not anyone—try to put them into that crazy box—not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar.
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