After the Quake, by Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin

Japan's coolest writer portrays people who are shaken but seldom stirred, says Robert Hanks

The quake of the title is the Kobe earthquake of 17 January 1995, which killed more than 6,000 people and destroyed a quarter of a million homes. The six stories collected here all take place in the weeks following this national trauma; but while mentioned in every one, it is only tangentially relevant. In the first, "UFO in Kushiro", the protagonist's wife watches coverage of the earthquake obsessively before walking out on him.

One of the three people in "Landscape with Flatiron", a middle-aged beach-bum with a Zen approach to building bonfires, is a native of Kobe, but denies any emotional attachment. "All God's Children Can Dance" concerns a young man whose mother has told him he is the son of God (he is not convinced); she is now helping the relief effort.

Earthquakes play a central role in only one story, "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo": a bank worker is approached by a giant invisible frog who begs for his support in a battle with the Worm, a subterranean creature who absorbs hatred, excreting it in the form of earthquakes. Frog's victory averts the total annihilation of Tokyo.

From this, among other clues, you might gather that Haruki Murakami sees seismic events as analogous to social convulsions, if not actually caused by them. None of the stories mentions the Tokyo subway nerve-gas attack carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo cult on 20 March 1995, just two months after Kobe. Given that this event was the subject of Murakami's sole work of non-fiction, Underground, the omission is surely deliberate. Perhaps we should think of After the Quake as an investigation of the psychic preconditions for the attack.

But for all the apparent topicality, Murakami doesn't stray outside his rigorously delineated fictional world. The rootless loners who inhabit these stories, the sexually available yet enigmatic women, the quasi-supernatural apparatus of parallel realities and talking beasts; above all, the tone of voice, disillusionment devoid of bitterness: he sticks to these as tightly as Dick Francis sticks to racehorses. Admiration for his singleness of purpose vies with impatience at the repetitiveness and whimsy.

Murakami himself can't be unaware of this problem. The last story, "Honey Pie", concerns a writer who produces nothing but short stories, most of which depict "the course of unrequited love" – mirroring his futile passion for his best friend's wife. Towards the end, this love is requited (though a last-minute interruption prevents its consummation). Next morning, the writer thinks: "I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far." Is this a feeling Murakami shares? And if he did write different stories, how would his readers feel: disappointed or relieved?