61 pages • 2 hours read
Haruki Murakamiafter the quake
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 4 Summary: “Thailand”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, racism, gender discrimination, pregnancy termination, and addiction.
Satsuki is a pathologist who is traveling from Japan to Bangkok for the World Thyroid Convention. She experiences uncomfortable hot flashes on the flight and thinks about how few people concern themselves with the effects of menopause. She wonders if modern medicine has made human problems worse. A flight attendant announces a request for a doctor, and Satsuki hesitates to volunteer. She remembers past incidents when male physicians on a flight belittled her qualifications to provide medical attention. After a pause, she presses her call button.
In Bangkok, Satsuki stays with friends from Detroit where she had formerly worked for 10 years in the university hospital. Three years ago, Satsuki finalized a messy divorce from her husband, who had an alcohol addiction and an extramarital affair. He blamed her for not wanting to have children. Shortly after the divorce, her car was vandalized with a racist slur. Exasperated with her life in America, Satsuki moved to Japan, where she works at a university hospital in Tokyo.
After the conference, Satsuki remains in Thailand for an extra week for a vacation. Her friend in America, a reporter with many contacts in Southeast Asia from his time covering the Khmer Rouge, made all the arrangements for her stay at a resort north of Bangkok. He arranged to have Nimit, a Thai man in his early sixties, be her personal driver and guide. The friend playfully advised Satsuki to do nothing and let Nimit take charge.
The next morning, Nimit picks up Satsuki in a vintage Mercedes limousine. Satsuki admires the car and finds Nimit to be polite and professional. They drive past elephants in the noisy streets of Bangkok, and Nimit explains that without enough logging work in the countryside, the animals were brought into the city for tourists. The elephants sometimes get frightened and cause damage, but the police do not have the resources to confiscate the animals and house and feed them. Instead, the elephants are left alone.
Nimit plays jazz tapes during the long drive. Satsuki comments that her father was a huge fan and that she grew up appreciating the older jazz performers. Her father was a pediatrician who died of cancer when Satsuki was a teenager. A month after his death, her mother sold off his jazz collection. Satsuki recalls her father’s death as a turning point in her life when everything went wrong. She has not listened to jazz in years. Her ex-husband hated the genre and only listened to opera.
Satsuki lies to Nimit about not knowing anyone in Kobe. Privately, she thinks about a man and hopes he died violently in the earthquake last month. Nimit comments on the mystery of earthquakes and how one’s stability can suddenly be upended when the solid ground turns to liquid. He drives past gray monkeys staring from the trees and drops Satsuki off at a luxurious resort in the mountains. At the busy poolside, Satsuki takes a nap and dreams about being a rabbit surrounded by a wire fence.
The next morning, Nimit drives Satsuki to a private swimming pool, where she enjoys doing laps away from the resort crowds. The pool is old and serene, and Satsuki is grateful for Nimit’s forethought. With the pool all to herself, Satsuki feels free, and swimming feels like flying. Nimit returns at noon with snacks, and Satsuki continues the routine of swimming and having lunch at the private pool for the entire week.
On one of their drives, Nimit tells Satsuki that he learned English from working as a chauffeur for a Norwegian businessman for 33 years. When the man died, Nimit inherited his car and jazz collection. After so many years of service, Nimit felt as if he had become the man’s shadow and could not distinguish which thoughts and desires were his own. He compares it to being like a husband and wife, and Satsuki wonders if the two men were lovers. Nimit does not regret his decisions in life, but Satsuki is unsure if she can say the same about herself. They drive past the gray monkeys.
On her last night, Nimit takes Satsuki to see an old woman in an impoverished village. Satsuki is shocked that such a place could be so close to the luxury resort. The old woman has a powerful voice and holds Satsuki’s hand firmly for 10 minutes. She tells Satsuki that she has a hard, white stone that has been inside her body for a long time. Satsuki must get rid of it or else it will be the only thing that remains after she dies and is cremated. She tells Satsuki that she will have a dream about a snake that will eat the stone for her if she holds onto the creature until she awakes. In her last words, she tells Satsuki that the man is not dead and that she should be grateful.
Nimit tells Satsuki that the old woman predicts dreams and is like a doctor for the spirit. He has never taken a client to see her before but sensed that Satsuki, a beautiful and strong person, has problems weighing her down. He advises Satsuki to give equal importance to living and dying and to be prepared to face death. That night, Satsuki cries, thinking about the stone and the snake. She admits to wishing for an earthquake to make the man in Kobe suffer. She thinks about a child she never gave birth to and the man she has hated for 30 years. She blames him for turning her into stone. In the distance, the gray monkeys stare at her.
At the airport for her return home, Satsuki gives Nimit $100 and thanks him. She tries to tell him a long-held secret about her mother’s reaction to her father’s death, but Nimit stops her short and tells her to have her dream. He tells her not to put her feelings into words, as “words turn into stone” and can turn feelings into lies (78). He tells her about the Norwegian man, who never returned to his homeland despite missing it. Something had kept him away, and he was another person who carried a stone within. The Norwegian had told Nimit about the solitary lives of polar bears, which made the men wonder why bears or humans exist at all. On the flight home, Satsuki thinks about words turning to stone, her solitary swims, and her father’s favorite jazz piece. She closes her eyes and waits for her dream.
Story 4 Analysis
The story begins in mid-flight, a liminal space that highlights the uncertainty and ambiguity of Murakami’s signature style and emphasizes the theme of The Journey Into the Unconscious. Satsuki crosses a boundary—a motif throughout the collection, in this case taking the form of a national border—and goes on a journey to someplace new and disorienting as a metaphor for an internal exploration of her psyche. Satsuki feels hot flashes and self-doubt about her medical qualifications in the enclosed space of the airplane, marking her journey as one beginning from a place of stifling confinement and ending in a more freeing experience.
Satsuki spends most of her vacation swimming, an activity that initially represents meditation and coping. When Satsuki swims, she feels free from worries and anxieties and is able to “thrust all unpleasant memories from her mind” (71). Her feelings of liberation are mirrored when she swims the backstroke and looks up to see that “[w]hite clouds float[] in the sky, and birds and dragonflies cut across them” (72). The imagery highlights the feelings of lightness and serenity that come with communing with nature. She physically and spiritually immerses herself in the natural element, and as her body adjusts to the water’s temperature, her mind finds tranquility. Swimming provides her with “a chance not to think about anything” (72), and she wishes she could “stay like this forever” (72). Satsuki appears to have found an outlet for her stress and a way to unburden herself from her haunting memories.
However, the narrative tone gradually shifts to suggest that Satsuki’s dreamlike luxury vacation is simply that: a fantasy that does not engage with reality. Satsuki makes a routine of going to the pool, eating the lunches that Nimit serves “on a silver tray” (71), and swimming again until Nimit transports her in a car that “look[s] like an object from another world, as if it had dropped fully formed from someone’s fantasies” (65). The hotel is a utopian locale with “twenty-four-hour room service” and “an elegant canopy bed” (69). Satsuki “repeat[s] the exact same routine for five days in a row” (72), and the lack of variation begins to feel like a mechanical and escapist form of living. The resort comes to resemble a cross between Shangri-la and Homer’s island of the Lotus-Eaters from The Odyssey. Satsuki’s years of swimming may have kept her physically fit, as “she had never been confined to bed with an illness or sensed any physical disorder” (71), but this also implies that swimming kept her from addressing her emotional needs. Satsuki “never step[s] out of the hotel except to go to the pool” (72), and her holiday routine keeps her from confronting reality and stepping outside of the predictable and safe world of her creation.
Intuiting that Satsuki is burdened with a heavy heart, Nimit awakens her from her reprieve from reality. In contrast to the utopian comforts of the mountainous resort, Nimit takes Satsuki to a nearby village with “[f]ilthy, emaciated livestock. Muddy pockmarked road. Air filled with the smell of water buffalo dung” (74). The short, incomplete sentences are sharp, jabbing reminders to Satsuki of what people’s lives are like outside of her escapist dream. Satsuki is shocked that the village is so close to the resort, and the contrasting setting is a commentary on the theme of Alienation and Class Disparity in Modern Urban Society, revealing Satsuki’s limited perspective. The juxtaposition of her American friend’s coverage of the Khmer Rouge and his contacts with luxury resorts in Southeast Asia is an early foreshadowing of her indifference to social inequalities.
In the opening scene on the plane, the narrative suggests that part of Satsuki’s malaise may be rooted in the sexism of her profession and, as a woman in the early stages of menopause, the ageism of society. She recalls past incidents on planes when male physicians belittled her authority as a doctor, and she thinks about society’s indifference to menopause. As an appropriate antidote to her malaise, Satsuki finds healing from an old, female soothsayer in her eighties. The woman has “deep wrinkles,” a “back [that] [i]s bent,” and a “bony frame” (74), physical characteristics that emphasize her role as the archetype of the witch-healer. Rather than connote inferiority or obsolescence, the woman’s gender and age represent wisdom and the power of spirituality. Throughout the story, the esteem for old age is evident in the various ways that Satsuki appreciates all the “old stuff” like Nimit’s old and “perfect” limousine (67, 65), the older jazz musicians that evoke nostalgia for her father, and the old and “authentic” private swimming pool (70). The old woman’s mystic diagnosis allows Satsuki to learn how to treat her invisible and spiritual ailments.
The stone inside Satsuki is a symbol of resentment and a manifestation of Satsuki’s ill will that has calcified over the last 30 years toward an unnamed man. Satsuki blames the man from Kobe for turning her body and heart to stone. The ambiguity of the man’s identity and an enigmatic reference to a traumatic event 30 years ago emphasize the unknowability of the unconscious. The synopsis of the Vintage Books 2003 publication of the collection describes the unnamed man as “a lover who destroyed her chances of having children.” References to an unborn child and its destruction down a well suggest that the event 30 years ago was an abortion. Some interpretations regard the man as someone responsible for a pregnancy and abortion that left Satsuki sterile and unable to give her husband a child. Other readers have interpreted the man to be her ex-husband, who has adjusted to life after the divorce in Kobe with his new family. In either interpretation, the stone represents a hardened core of bitterness in Satsuki’s psyche that threatens to define her entire existence.
At the end of the story, Satsuki looks forward to expelling the stone inside her and takes to heart Nimit’s advice to prepare herself for death. He counsels, “If you devote all your energy to living, you will not be able to die well” (77). Nimit’s attention to death is not founded on morbidity or depression but a grander perspective that encourages Satsuki to assess her life as if death is around the corner. Being prepared for death means coming to terms with the decisions and actions that one has made in the past. To be prepared means to face death without unfinished business, regrets, and missed opportunities. Satsuki’s last thoughts before she falls asleep on her return flight are a culmination of the sky during her swims and her father’s jazz records, two symbols of freedom and serenity. The presence of jazz music throughout the story highlights the theme of The Arts as a Source of Self-Discovery and Renewal. In contrast to the story’s opening, where Satsuki felt an unbearable heat and judgment, Satsuki returns home unafraid to wrestle the monsters in her dreams.
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