The 1995 Kobe earthquake was a catastrophe that disturbed the very foundations of modern Japan. In inspired, as many natural disasters do, great works of art, music, and literature, including Haruki Murakami’s sparse and enigmatic short story collection After the Quake.
After the Quake (2000) comprises six tales that alternate between emotional turmoil and flights of whimsy. The collection responds to the national tragedy that unfolded in the wake of the earthquake – families were divided, homes were destroyed and infrastructure was decimated.
This film first had life as a TV series for Japanese station NHK. The original episodes have been stitched together and repackaged as an anthology film for Netflix’s global audience. The film…
The 1995 Kobe earthquake was a catastrophe that disturbed the very foundations of modern Japan. In inspired, as many natural disasters do, great works of art, music, and literature, including Haruki Murakami’s sparse and enigmatic short story collection After the Quake.
After the Quake (2000) comprises six tales that alternate between emotional turmoil and flights of whimsy. The collection responds to the national tragedy that unfolded in the wake of the earthquake – families were divided, homes were destroyed and infrastructure was decimated.
This film first had life as a TV series for Japanese station NHK. The original episodes have been stitched together and repackaged as an anthology film for Netflix’s global audience. The film features four of the collection’s six stories and director Tsuyoushi Inoue confidently reconfigures Murakami’s tales so that they speak directly to other tragedies in chronological order.
The first story, UFO in Kushiro, takes place during the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The shoreline setting of Landscape With Flatiron ominously foreshadows the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis and still remains the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan. All God’s Children can Dance is set during COVID, while the final story, Super-Frog Saves Tokyo is a modern-day fable that aims to tie all these disparate strands together.
Actor Masaki Okada and screenwriter Takamasa Ōe reunite after having previously worked together on the 2022 Academy Award-winning Murakami adaptation Drive My Car. Their expertise in Murakami-land renders them steady hands to guide the film.
- ** Read more: How to read Haruki Murakami in English the Japanese way – in four steps ** *
As previously seen in Drive My Car, Ōe demonstrates a canny ability to transmute multiple stories into a satisfying overarching narrative. Meanwhile Okada, the lead of UFO in Kushiro, delivers a performance of polite banality entirely removed from his insidious and devilish Drive My Car character. His blank slate protagonist is a perfect representation of the typical Murakami narrator: a dazed and unremarkable man of submerged conflicts.
Meticulously constructed and shot, the first part follows a young man whose wife divorces him without explanation following the Kobe earthquake. The connection between the two events is unclear. In need of solitude to work out this puzzle, he travels to the northern island of Hokkaido with a mysterious package.
This section is strongly acted, with Okada finding good support in Ai Hashimoto. It is technically excellent too: cinematographer Yasutaka Watanabe makes the most of the vertical lines of Japanese houses, creating a paper theatre effect in which a pleasing sense of depth is created by a series of framed sliding doors and rigid, angular proportions.
This first part – and to a lesser extent, the two follow-up stories – feels indebted to the late-90s cinematic output of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose work similarly features architectural geometry, static takes and an extensive wardrobe of heavy knit. After the Quake shares with Kurosawa a sense of the genuinely eerie: an early scene involving a woman whose face is preternaturally bathed in shadow is unsettling and recalls Kurosawa’s underrated horror Retribution (2006).
Moments like this capture the essence of Murakami’s appeal. As a writer, Murakami is an obsessive documenter of the mundane. His fiction is not so much punctuated as defined by grocery shopping, vegetable chopping, and red-light traffic stopping. But this has a paradoxical effect. Only through curating such a recognisable and “normal” world can the truly shocking and absurd moments of novels satisfyingly land. This is a quality often overlooked in Murakami adaptations.
Lee Chang-dong’s otherwise superior Murakami adaptation Burning (2018) is entirely neurotically bleak and fails to create a sense of normality. Meanwhile the recent Murakami animation Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022) is weird and off-putting from the outset. After the Quake takes pains to create a feeling of safety and normality, before it threatens this stability with the absurd.
If After the Quake falters, it is at the finish line. The final 40 minutes of the film, which draws on Murakami’s beloved story Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, are spirited and funny. But attempts to unify too many disparate narrative threads stretch the section a little thin.
Earlier in the film, the thematic connections between stories were hinted at. By overtly making visible the connective strings, the engagingly synaptic structure of the film collapses a little as subtlety gives way to literalism. This undercuts the mysterious power of the apparently disconnected stories.
Nonetheless, the Super-Frog sequences remain entertaining and ambitious. Among Murakami’s most fantastical stories, it involves a giant talking frog who invites a man named Katagiri (delicately portrayed by Koichi Sato) to battle Worm, Frog’s arch nemesis who’s responsible for earthquakes all across Japan. Frog is wonderfully realised onscreen through an old-fashioned monster costume. He is lovable, trustworthy, and utterly bizarre.
Super-Frog is something of a Murakami classic and was recently re-released in English translation by Jay Rubin in a beautiful illustrated standalone volume. Ōe and Inoue do not adapt the story straight, instead presenting a wistful sequel to the original tale.
In the film’s version, 30 years have passed since Frog and Katagiri last met. By meeting again to battle Worm, the film argues for the timelessness of the original story. If Worm is a stand-in for natural disaster, there must always be a Super-Frog and an everyman to stand against it.
In all, After the Quake is an audacious and spirited film that captures the essence of the Murakami experience. The closing moments are touching, elegiac and tender, serving as a suitable closing for a fine adaptation of a master storyteller’s work.
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