Books like After the Quake
Six stories set in the weeks after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, about people shaken by it from a distance, including a bank debt collector whom a giant frog recruits to save Tokyo from a worm underground.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of After the Quake
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Twenty-four stories from across his career, among them a waitress granted one wish on her twentieth birthday and a monkey in Shinagawa that steals people's names.
Men Without Women
Seven stories about men who have lost the women in their lives, including an actor who hires a young woman as his driver and finds himself telling her about his late wife.
Death Valley
With her father in intensive care after an accident, a novelist from Los Angeles checks into a Best Western in Death Valley to hike alone, and the desert begins to open up in ways she cannot explain.
Kitchen
A young Tokyo woman who has lost everyone is taken in by a boy and his trans mother, and cooks her way through the shape grief takes when it has nowhere to sit but a kitchen.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
In a cramped basement café in Tokyo, one particular seat lets a customer travel back in time, as long as they keep to the rules and return before their coffee goes cold; four visitors take the chance to see someone again.
The Lantern of Lost Memories
In an old-fashioned photo studio between life and death, Mr Hirasaka helps the newly departed look back over their lives through a lantern of memories and step back into one moment to photograph it again.
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Seventy very short stories Kawabata wrote across his life, few longer than two pages, of chance meetings, love, death and the turning seasons.
Parakeet
The week before her wedding, a woman known as the Bride is visited by her dead grandmother in the form of a parakeet, who tells her to find the estranged brother she has not seen in years.
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Bender's first collection of short, strange fables, among them a man whose lover is going through reverse evolution and a girl with a hand made of fire.
Deep River
Four Japanese travellers with separate wounds arrive at Varanasi on a tourist itinerary, and Endo tracks what the Ganges does to each of their unlikely faiths.
We'll Prescribe You a Cat
In a Kyoto building that isn't on any map, the Nakagyo Kokoro Clinic for the Soul sees only the patients who manage to find it, and its doctor sends each of them home with a prescription: a cat.
Bliss Montage
Eight surreal stories about women in flight from the past: one lives in a house with her husband and all of her ex-boyfriends, another takes a drug that makes her disappear.