Down on the waterfront of the Chuo Ward in Kobe, Japan, sits a large glass box. It measures about 60 metres on each side. Inside the box is another, slightly smaller box, with white walls. The most remarkable thing about these nested boxes is a time – 5:46am – printed in large font on the front wall of the inner box and visible from the street. It is as if a giant, futuristic alarm clock malfunctioned early one morning and was dumped on a vacant block between a shopping centre and a park.
The boxes are home to the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial. The complex, which includes a museum and a disaster research institute, commemorates the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, which struck Kobe at 5:46am on January 17, 1995. The result was devastating, toppling buildings and expressways and igniting fires across the city. Over 5,000 people were killed.
The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial is one attempt to help residents and visitors make sense of Kobe’s awesome and disturbing encounter with the deep forces of the earth. Haruki Murakami’s short story collection after the quake, published in 2000, attempts to do the same. The collection’s six stories are full of odd, characteristically Murakami-esque interpersonal encounters, but overshadowing them all is the vast interpersonal presence of the earthquake.
Murakami’s reputation in the English-speaking world rests on his novels. On Goodreads, at the time of writing, after the quake languishes well down the list of books ranked by popularity. Along with the other short story collections it sits below all the major novels and almost all the minor ones, and perches just above the scramble of misnamed books, non-English language editions, incomplete versions of IQ84 and stranded individual short stories that bring up the rear.
Filmmakers have proven more enthusiastic about the short stories, with adaptations including Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018, from The Elephant Vanishes) and Ryusuke Hamagushi’s Drive My Car (2021, from Men Without Women). after the quake is a clear influence on Pierre Földes’ Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022), although it plays second-fiddle (at least on naming rights) to the 2006 collection.
Measured by adaptations, after the quake has one outstanding story. ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ has been adapted (sometimes alongside other stories) for the stage, for the screen (twice) and as a graphic novel. An illustrated gift edition was published in October 2025. There are many ways to encounter Super-Frog outside the original collection.
The tone of ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ is clear from the first line: “Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment.” Katagiri soon learns that the frog (named Frog) is on a bizarre mission. Frog explains that the recent Kobe earthquake awakened a giant worm (named Worm) who is in a very bad mood. Unless Frog can defeat Worm in combat, Worm will strike Tokyo with its own devastating earthquake.
The story that follows is deeply strange. It is open to several interpretations, although it is difficult at first to find one that can accommodate the cartoonish premise. Is it all a hallucination? If so, we are left to find whatever sense we can in an outlandish allegory. If not, then it is all very heroic for Frog to save Tokyo from destruction but it does beg the question – why didn’t poor Kobe deserve the same? Whimsical or melancholy encounters with anthropomorphic animals and peculiar characters inject a healthy sense of the absurd into the self-inflicted trials of many Murakami protagonists, but don’t they seem trivial and trivialising when thousands of lives are at stake?
In the 25 years since after the quake was first published, global anxiety about our fraught encounters with the natural world has exploded. The collection grapples with issues of national and international importance, and if this makes ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ seem discordant it strengthens the other stories. Placing the characters’ personal struggles in the context of the earthquake, an event of unambiguous significance, could minimise them. Instead, it invests them with dignity.
‘UFO in Kushiro’ has a familiar Murakami premise. A man’s wife disappears suddenly, which launches him on a journey to meet two enigmatic young women. There is a mysterious MacGuffin that causes confusion but is never really explained. It is easy enough to understand how the protagonist’s wife seizes on the earthquake is the only reliable source of meaning:
“Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways. She never said a word.”
With this opening, a story that could have been a meditation on personal alienation becomes a reflection of a society in shock. Silence and withdrawal look less like eccentric behaviour, and more like reasonable responses to the failure of community in the face of a brutal and arbitrary disaster.
In ‘Thailand’, pathologist Satsuki extends a work trip to Bangkok into her own form of withdrawal. It quickly becomes clear that Satsuki is escaping from more than her work, and that her personal problems are closely linked to Kobe in ways that leave her feeling conflicted by news of the earthquake. Nothing supernatural is required in this or the other stories in the collection to create the pervasive sense of deep disturbance:
“Strange and mysterious things, though, aren’t they – earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being ‘down to earth’ or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly we see that it isn’t true.”
The protagonist of ‘All God’s Children Can Dance’ does not need an earthquake to feel untethered. Raised by his devout single mother, Yoshiya’s only knowledge of his father comes from a story his mother herself describes as “a weird sequence of events”. A chance sighting of a man on a train station leads him to a spiritual encounter that changes his perspectives on his various father figures, real and imagined.
‘Landscape with Flatiron’ and ‘Honey Pie’ are the standout stories of the collection. In ‘Honey Pie’, the third wheel of a university relationship is given another chance at love in a story that is nonetheless ultimately about the value of non-romantic connections. In ‘Landscape with Flatiron’, Junko becomes friends with an older man, Miyake, who has the unusual habit of lighting bonfires on the local beach. Their musings on Miyake’s past, Junko’s future and the work of Jack London are a quietly moving exploration of how to live with the knowledge that the world is cold and the fires must eventually go out: “Don’t worry”, says Miyake with the story’s suffusing blend of melancholy and optimism, “When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling the cold. You’ll wake up whether you want it or not.”
How do people create meaning when the presence of impersonal and uncontrollable risks is an undeniable reality? This is an enduring and ever more timely question.
On 26 December 2004, the tsunami triggered by a quake 2,800 times more powerful than the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake swept across the Indian Ocean. It would kill over 230,000 people across 14 countries.
On 12 January 2010, Haiti was crippled by an earthquake near Port-au-Prince. The death toll is disputed but is in the hundreds of thousands.
On 11 March 2011, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan produced a tsunami that overwhelmed sea walls, levelled entire towns and killed almost 20,000.
On 6 February 2023, tens of thousands were killed in Türkiye and Syria, in the deadliest earthquake to strike the region in almost 1,500 years.
Since 2000, hundreds of thousands more have died in floods, storms, heatwaves, fires and droughts that have displaced millions.
Frog and Worm may have been the dreams of a lonely man, but worms are real. Some woke themselves and many are of our own waking, but they are all angry. We have our own frogs too. Some of them work in a glass box beside a park in Kobe.
And so we return to the seemingly awkward metaphor of ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’, which really should be encountered for the first time in its proper place. Read as part of the collection, its tone is less jarring. With poor Katagiri, we must accept the presence of strange forces in our lives working in ways we don’t understand (if not always in our kitchens). Sometimes we can help tip the balance in favour of the frogs, by reaching out to a neighbour or volunteering our time. What makes these small acts heroic is that, like Karagiri, we don’t know how they could possibly be enough to make a difference to the big picture. The rest of the time we built bonfires against the night, not in ignorance of the earthquakes, storms, infernos and floods, but knowing that the dark is ultimately what gives the bonfires any meaning at all.
