The Earthquake as a Reflection on the Past in Después del terremoto (2000) by Haruki Murakami and Fractura (2018) by Andrés Neuman

Abstract

This article analyzes the presence of the earthquake in the short story collection Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (All God's Children Dance, 2000; translated as After the Quake in 2002 and After the Earthquake in 2013), by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and in the novel Fractura (2018), by the Argentine Andrés Neuman. First, the article addresses theoretical categories that allow us to compare and contrast literary works from different contexts on the basis of their representations of disaster. Second, a textual analysis is made to demonstrate that the earthquake is presented in both cases as a narrative mechanism that leads the characters to reflect on the past and to resignify their lives in the post-disaster present. Beyond this coincidence, however, the article proposes that there is a fundamental difference between the two authors analyzed. In the case of Murakami, the earthquake is removed from the actual event and functions exclusively as a mechanism to connect the stories and to make the characters reflect on their past. In Neuman's case, on the contrary, the earthquake functions as a real event that produces aftershocks in the consciences of the characters and leads them to reflect on the past not only as an individual phenomenon, but also as a collective one. Through this fundamental difference it is possible to glimpse, from comparative literature, two divergent mechanisms of approaching history by the authors.