To refresh my memory:
Spoiler:
(6 short stories, 200 pages, published in 2000)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_quake
"The stories were written in response to Japan's 1995 Kobe earthquake, and each story is affected peripherally by the disaster. Along withUnderground, a collection of interviews and essays about the 1995 Tokyo gas attacks, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a complex exploration of Japan's modern history, after the quake represents part of an effort on the part of Murakami to adopt a more purposeful exploration of the Japanese national conscience.
The stories in after the quake repeat motifs, themes, and elements common in much of Murakami's earlier short stories and novels, but also present some notable stylistic changes. All six stories are told in the third person, as opposed to Murakami's much more familiar first person narrative established in his previous work. Additionally, only one of the stories contains clear supernatural elements, which are present in the majority of Murakami's stories. All of the stories are set in February 1995, the month between the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attacks. Translator Jay Rubin says of the collection, "The central characters in after the quake live far from the physical devastation, which they witness only on TV or in the papers, but for each of them the massive destruction unleashed by the earth itself becomes a turning point in their lives. They are forced to confront an emptiness they have borne inside them for years."
The stories were original published in:
UFO in Kushiro…. The New Yorker
Landscape with Flat iron…. Ploughshares
All God's Children Can Dance… Harper's
Thailand… Granta
Super-Frog Saves Tokyo..GQ
Honey Pie… The New Yorker
I started to read the first story: 'UFO in Kushiro' and right away I thought that this first story is about the earthquake in Kobo, but also about a personal earthquake.