Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five-foot-three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog’s imposing bulk.
The book is comprised of six independent stories that are all connected by the shared experience of the 1995 earthquake that rattled Kobe, Japan. The strangest and most engaging by far is “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” which is a tale about exactly what the title promises. The opening line quoted above indicates the tone and mood and utterly surreal atmosphere of the story. The frog is here to enlist the assistance of Katagiri in a cosmic battle for the planet with a creature living underground known, appropriately, as Worm. It just gets weirder from there.
“The problem is that you never give me anything. Or, to put it more precisely, you have nothing inside you that you can give me. You are good and kind and handsome but living with you is like living with a chunk of air. It’s not entirely your fault, though. There are lots of women who will fall in love with you. But please don’t call me. Just get rid of all the stuff I’m leaving behind.”
The first story in the collection begins with a tale of a woman who has spent five days straight following the quake planted in front of the television, devouring every last detail of the coverage. When Komura returns home from his job in Tokyo, he is greeted by a missing wife, almost no trace of her existence left behind and the letter which also declares that she is never coming back. The story proceeds from this moment, unfolding in a way that at times feel almost like a dream, with an odd disjoined sense of reality.
“On the surface, at least, it looks like that. But in a sense, he was right. He did drown alone in a dark sea. He became an alcoholic. He soaked his body in his own despair—right to the core—and he died in agony. Premonitions can stand for something else sometimes.”
Miyake is relating a story about Jack London, who famous story “To Build a Fire” has already been reference. She relates how London had had premonition of his own death which would come by drowning at sea by being swept overboard in the middle of the night when no one could see. In reality, however, he died from complications related to morphine abuse. Miyake’s companion suggests that the lesson here is that he since he didn’t die in the way foreseen, the premonition didn’t come true. Miyake responds with an alternative interpretation.
"Strange and mysterious things, though, aren’t they—earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being ‘down to earth’ or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn’t true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be so solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid.”
A natural disaster on the level of the Kobe earthquake affects different people in a variety of ways. The stories contained in this collection all serve to prove there is no “proper response” to such devastation. Some look to the mysteries of scientific fact for explanations, some find solace in favorite works of literature, some run away while others escape the ineffable by diving head-long into the creativity of their own mind. People do whatever has to be done to cope and make it through to the other side.
