AFTER THE QUAKE

Murakami Adaptation Probes Post-Calamity Life

Venue(s): CineSwitch Ginza
from October 10 (Fri), 2025
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: www.bitters.co.jp/ATQ/
Theater website: cineswitch.com/about
Trailer: https://bit.ly/4nMdyhh

Advance tickets: Check theater website.

Title: アフター・ザ・クエイク (After the Quake)
Director: Tsuyoshi Inoue (井上剛)
Duration: 132 mins

Critics are fond of saying that Haruki Murakami’s dark, dreamlike stories resist cinematic adaptation, but after a string of high-profile cinematic recreations, this is not entirely true. Now, NHK director Tsuyoshi Inoue (celebrated for hit TV series like Amachan and Idaten) has teamed up with the producer and writer of the Oscar-winning Drive My Car (Teruhisa Yamamoto and Takamasa Oe ) to bring four dystopian Murakami short stories to the screen in the new film After the Quake, which is screening with English subtitles from Friday.

(You may recall that Tokyo Filmgoer was raving in 2024 about French musician and animator Pierre Földes’ Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which also brings several of the same tales to life. But Földes’ version was animated, while Inoue’s is resolutely not.)

The Murakami stories adapted by Inoue  — UFO in Kushiro, Landscape with Flatiron, All God’s Children Can Dance and Super-Frog Saves Tokyo — are reframed across Japan’s recent history of calamities, from the 1995 Kobe Earthquake to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake/nuclear meltdown, through the Covid-19 pandemic and into the present day.

At the heart of After the Quake are four characters grappling with loss and isolation: Komura (Masaki Okada), whose wife (Ai Hashimoto) inexplicably abandons him after the Kobe quake, leading him to follow clues of her whereabouts to Hokkaido, where he sees a UFO; Zenya (Daichi Watanabe), raised under the shadow of religious prophecy, struggling with his dying master (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) and an absent father; Junko (Yui Narumi), a young kombini clerk who bonds with a scruffy older customer (Shinichi Tsutsumi) and lights fires with him on a windswept beach; and Katagiri (Koichi Sato), a weary security guard living in an internet cafe, haunted by his past as a loan officer, recruited once again by the colossal Super-Frog “Kaeru-kun” (Non) to save Tokyo from the Worm (who feeds on human sorrow).

Inoue gets the atmosphere for these strange and beguiling tales just right, with striking visuals, smart editing and a haunting sound design.

CineSwitch Ginza