'after the quake'

I have a friend named Garrison, who I sincerely believe wants to read. However, due to his drive or attention span or the quality of things he's reading, he never finishes. He'll read 15 pages. Set the book down. And never pick it up again. Since I've known him, I bet there's been 20 books or stories that have endured the same fate: Incompletion.

I initially told him he should think small. Read 10 pages of a book everyday. A 300-page book would take a month to finish. Read 12 books a year. Not bad.

Failed.

Then I told him he should invest in short stories. I let him borrow some Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway.

Failed.

I would recommend to him Haruki Murakami's after the quake, but all know how that would end. Incompletion.

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after the quake is a series of short stories written following the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. The actual earthquake is a peripheral tragedy in Murakami's characters' lives. But it's interesting that an act of God would evoke a reaction of writing six short stories.

The Kobe earthquake or the Great Hanshin earthquake happened on Jan. 17, 1995. It measured a 6.8 Moment magnitude scale and it killed 6,434 people, about 4,000 of which in Kobe.

Now, we should put this earthquake in some kind of perspective. Six thousand people doesn't seem like much. It actually pales in comparison to the 1.5 million that lived in Kobe alone. Although the deaths are nothing to sneeze at, death-wise, it's not that mind blowing. In the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, 140,000 people died.

How the Kobe earthquake became such a disaster is that it was the most costly natural disaster for any one country in recorded history. It cost Japan 10 trillion yen. That, at the time, was 2.5 percent of Japan's gross domestic product.

The other effect the earthquake had was on volunteerism. The country initially took grief for rejecting outside aid, but about 1.2 million volunteers went into action helping others and doing things like distributing food and water. The day, some say, is a turning point in the country's acceptance of volunteering. Even the yakuza distributed food and water.

That is something to write about.