Chris Holmes, chair and associate professor of Literatures in English, published an essay on the short fiction of the Japanese author Haruki Murakami in Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. In "After the Quake," he recalls living in Japan during the year of the Kobe Earth Quake and the Tokyo subway gas attacks, and later reading Murakami's attempts to come to grips with that violent moment in Japan's post-war years. Chris considers why these stories are so often overlooked even by the most zealous readers of Murakami's work, arguing that their proximity to real trauma makes Murakami's typically hallucinatory style feel like realism.
Chris would like to thank his colleagues Jen Spitzer, Kasia Bartoszynska, and Alexis Becker, and his former colleague, Dyani Taff (now of Colby College) for their editorial help preparing this essay.
