After the Quake

How do you find your footing when the world beneath you has been shaken? In these six stories, you'll discover how ordinary people—a drifting husband, an estranged daughter, a lonely salesman—confront the quiet aftershocks of a national tragedy and the private earthquakes that have fractured their own lives. Explore how these characters navigate their fractured realities, finding unexpected connections and moments of surreal magic. You'll learn how Murakami uses strange encounters, from a talking frog to a mysterious bonfire, to reveal profound truths about loss, healing, and the search for meaning when everything you once knew has changed.

Haruki Murakami is a perennial Nobel Prize contender and one of the world's most celebrated authors, whose works have been translated into over fifty languages. A native of Kyoto, Murakami was living abroad during the 1995 Kobe earthquake and sarin gas attack, two national traumas that profoundly shook Japan. He channeled his feelings of distance and dislocation into the six masterful stories collected in After the Quake, exploring the subtle, surreal, and deeply human ways that catastrophe ripples through ordinary lives.