I’ve been on a Murakami kick. I just read after the quake his collection of short stories. I read after dark, too.
This passage from the short story “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” in the collection after the quake keeps coming back to me:
“That’s fine, Mr. Katagiri. It’s better that you don’t remember. The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats. Each and every one of us is a being of limited duration: all of us eventually go down to defeat. But as Ernest Hemingway saw so clearly, the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose. You and I together, Mr. Katagiri, were able to prevent the annihilation of Tokyo. We saved a hundred and fifty thousand people from the jaws of death. No one realizes it, but that is what we accomplished.”
Frog says this to Mr. Katagiri. Katagiri doesn’t realize, yet, that Frog is mortally injured.
Reading it, I can’t be sure if the conversation is really happening or if it’s all in Katagiri’s head. Frog might be a representation of something inside Katagiri – an illness or a weakness.
Frog may represent something greater: our human struggle with things that are so large that they seem impossible to defeat…until we realize that the only way to defeat them is to act, no matter how insignificant we or our actions may seem in comparison.
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