Blog

I saw a play with my girl this weekend called After the Quake, and it was REALLY GOOD. It’s an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami book. It was a different than I expected, cause I don’t know much about Murakami, or about the book… But from what I heard, I thought the book was about real peoples’ stories of survival after a big earthquake hit Japan in 1995. It may have been inspired by true stories, but it seemed much more fictional than real. In his writing style, I guess Murakami is a surrealist author, dwelling on the idea of the imaginary and the real. What is either, and how do we know it? So the play took two of the six short stories from his book, and presented it in an interweaving way, where you hop from one story back to the other, but they’re still linked because, say, the second story is being narrated by a storybook writer in the first story. The types of characters in each of the stories seemed to parallel, too. There being one character in each story that was socially viewed as having strength, but had internal battles with his own weaknesses. In the first story it was a college jock who married the girl everyone else wanted, but wasn’t happy in his relationship, with his family, or his dream job. In the second story, it was a human-size talking, philosophical, frog who needed to kill a giant underground worm in order to save Tokyo from a big earthquake, but couldn’t do it without other people there to cheer him on. The other characters paralleled in similar ways. There was so much going on in the story, and all in all, it was really gripping, and exciting. It ended, for me, on a somewhat confusing note. But I think I just didn’t get it… But even though, it was still really, really awesome.