When I’m reading a story and something magical or unrealistic happens, my brain shuts down, my eyes glaze over, and my reading speed slows to near-illiteracy. Blame it on my lack of imagination, but this is why I never made it through Haruki Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore (which a friend had recommended to me with glowing praise).

My loss, I realize, now that I’ve read Murakami’s after the quake, a collection of short stories loosely related to the 1995 Kobe earthquake. In these stories, Murakami’s trademark magical realism isn’t of the overtly baffling variety; the mysteriousness is more subtle, and displays an uncanny logic on an emotional, if not quite literal, level.

The themes of loss and spiritual crisis pervade the collection: a man seeks out a wife who has left him with nothing but a cryptic note; a boy simultaneously confronts Oedipal tensions with a possessive mother and the question of his father’s identity; a writer is caught in a strange love triangle with his two best friends from college. Murakami’s characters engage you with their ordinariness, and then win you over with their unexpected complexity and capacity for insight. Check out these stories if you haven’t already. I’ll be revisiting Murakami’s novels from now on.

The Guardian’s Review of after the quake