Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. He met his wife, Yoko, at university and they opened a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. The massive success of his novel Norwegian Wood (1987) made him a national celebrity. He fled Japan and did not return until 1995. His other books include Dance Dance Dance, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Underground, his first work of non-fiction,Sputnik Sweetheart, and South of the Border, West of the Sun. He has translated into Japanese the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, John Irving and Raymond Carver.

The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. And then the earthquake struck. For the characters in after the quake,the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: a lover who destroyed her chances of having children. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Junpei"s estrangedparents live in Kobe. Should he contact them? Miyake left his family in Kobe tomake midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Four-year-old Salahas nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a littlebox. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment, on a missionto save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm. "When he gets angry,he causes earthquakes," says Frog. "And right now he is very, very angry."

This new collection of stories, from one of the world"s greatest living writers,dissects the violence beneath the surface of modern Japan.

UFO in Kushiro

Landscape with Flatiron

All God"s Children Can Dance

Thailand

Super-Frog Saves Tokyo

Honey Pie