In the early months of 1995, Japan was shaken to the core by two disasters in close succession: First, the Kobe earthquake claimed the lives of more than 4,000 people and left nearly 300,000 homeless; then, members of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult launched a sarin-gas attack on Tokyo's subway system. After a long period abroad, novelist Haruki Murakami returned home for reasons both practical (his parents were among the Kobe homeless) and artistic, seeking to rediscover a country that had suddenly lost its equilibrium. Arriving fast on the heels of Underground, his ambitious and deeply moving collection of testimonials by witnesses to the gas attack, Murakami's slender, delicately wrought short-story cycle, After The Quake, isn't so direct in its psychological inquiry. But it's just as probing and insightful. The six stories each take place within the short period between the two tragedies, when the earthquake's tremors reverberated through everyone's lives, even those not remotely connected to the victims. Much like in the movie Signs, which inadvertently (and powerfully) speaks to the experience of most Americans on Sept. 11, the characters in After The Quake receive their information from secondhand sources, picking up fragments from television, radio, and newspapers. The earthquake doesn't uproot their lives so much as call them into question, triggering a mood of reflection that slowly morphs into action, as they confront their own mortality and spiritual emptiness, often for the first time. In "UFO In Kushiro," the hero's wife stares blankly at the television for five days straight, then disappears on the sixth, ending their stable marriage with a note informing him, in no uncertain terms, that she's never coming back. As he couriers a small, mysterious package from Tokyo to snowy, arid Hokkaido, news of the earthquake rarely surfaces, yet he's haunted by his wife's suggestion that she could no longer abide his vacant humanity. People seeking an identity are common in After The Quake, from a lonely businesswoman who seeks guidance from a Thai chauffeur while on vacation ("Thailand") to a confirmed bachelor whose born-again mother claims he's the Lord's son ("All God's Children Can Dance"). In the latter, the mother's charity work in Kobe gives her doubting son a chance to seek out the man he believes to be his real father, but in a strange and mesmerizing final scene, he brushes unexpectedly with the Divine. Murakami's penchant for bizarre, dreamlike imagery reaches a peak in the horror-comedy of "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," about a talking frog who convinces a man to help him fight a giant worm that's threatening Tokyo with an even more devastating earthquake than Kobe's. But the other stories are merely a prelude to the intensely personal "Honey Pie," which concerns a shy, passive middle-aged writer forever at the short end of a love triangle involving his two closest friends. When the opportunity arrives for him to claim the woman he loves, he's seized by ingrained feelings of fear and doubt, with the implications of the earthquake weighing heavily on his conscience. Murakami typically keeps the parallels between himself and his writer-hero vague and slippery, but their dilemma is largely the same. Faced with the specter of human tragedy, Murakami has accepted his own call to action: Taken as a companion to Underground, After The Quake continues his strong and eloquent response to the changing tenor of Japanese life.