After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

This is a collection of several short stories, all of which have loose connections to the earthquake in Kobe in 1995. I was a freshman in college in 1995 and have vague memories of the quake on TV, most of the news in the area I lived in being taken by the genocidal wars stemming from the break-up of Yugoslavia.  I am not a fan of short stories. I like to write them, because it is easy, but I do not like to read them, because they finish before they started.  All the short stories I've written were because I was too lazy to develop them into novels, or at least chapters of a novel.  It is much easier to hold the plot and characters of a short story in your head than the plot and characters of a novel (assuming at least 300 pages, as the publishers today seem to extort).

"UFO in Kushiro" is about a good looking guy who marries an ugly woman who then ends up leaving him because she says he is empty inside.  He goes to Hokkaido and another woman wants to make love to him but he is too depressed to get an erection.  He thinks on the meaning of life at the end. As if there was one to be had.

"Landscape with Flatiron" is about a runaway girl, who suspected her father wanted to have sex with her, but he never did, and lives as a grocery cashier with a young punk who thinks he know everything.  The only thing going for her in her life is meeting with a middle aged painter and making bonfires on the beach.

"Thailand" is about a Japanese doctor going to Bangkok to relax and having as a driver an immaculately groomed man in his 60s who is obviously gay and former gay lover of a Swedish gem dealer who apparently passed away from old age.  The doctor carries pain inside her and an old fortune teller from Thailand tells her how to get rid of it.

"Super Frog Saves Tokyo" originally published in GQ (why won't they publish me??) is about a giant frog fighting a giant worm below Tokyo in order to prevent and earthquake.  Also a tax collector without any life gets some hallucinations, but survives.

The last story "Honey Pie" is the longest and is again about the same theme Murakami keeps digesting, a young sensitive boy in love with young sensitive and beautiful girl, but the boy is too afraid to express his feelings because his self esteem is nil (for one reason or another, it doesn't really matter anyway).  The girl eventually finds a macho man to pound her, but eventually the macho either dumps her or she leaves, so she goes back to the sensitive boy who waited and tortured himself all these years for her.  And they live happily ever after.  No they don't.  Stories with characters like that usually end in separate asylums in real life.