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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 5 Summary: “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”
Katagiri is a loan collection officer at a Tokyo bank. One day after work, he finds a giant frog over six feet tall waiting for him in his apartment. Frog apologizes for barging into his home and has made tea in anticipation of Katagiri’s shock. Katagiri thinks that someone is playing a joke on him, but he gradually accepts the reality of Frog. He cautiously asks if Frog is affiliated with any gangs and tells him that he has no authority to negotiate his loan payments. Frog laughs and explains that his purpose is to save Tokyo from destruction and that he needs Katagiri’s help.
Frog agrees to answer Katagiri’s questions to ensure that they understand each other. Frog vows that he is neither a literary device nor a deconstruction and loudly croaks, “Ri-i-i-bit!” (84), to prove that he is a real frog. He tells Katagiri that a devastating earthquake will strike Tokyo and cause more destruction than the Kobe disaster. The epicenter will be directly below Katagiri’s bank. Frog plans to go underground and battle Worm, a dormant creature who has been absorbing the world’s vibrating hatred for decades. Frog does not consider Worm evil and accepts that such a being is entitled to exist. He compares the world to an overcoat with abundant and diverse pockets.
Katagiri thinks of his own personal battles in his 16 years as a collection officer. Mobsters have threatened his life, but Katagiri is unafraid of threats. He has no wife or children, no parents, and distant siblings. Losing his life makes no difference to the world or to himself.
Frog explains that the Kobe earthquake woke up Worm and his store of rage. Katagiri is Frog’s ideal ally for the battle because the small man has never once complained or shown anger about his unpleasant job, the lack of acknowledgement from his supervisors, or the ingratitude of his siblings for whom he has sacrificed his own well-being to support. Instead of regarding Katagiri as a meek man as others do, Frog considers him brave and sensible. Katagiri declares that he has no muscles to fight, and Frog explains that Katagiri’s desire for justice and words of encouragement are enough. Frog admits that he is a pacifist and afraid to fight, but he quotes Nietzsche and asserts that wisdom is to have no fear.
To prove his existence, Frog leaves and threatens one of Katagiri’s tougher clients, a trading company with political backing that has failed to make payments. The following day at work, Katagiri learns that his client has vowed to pay back the entire loan so long as Frog never visits him again. Frog visits Katagiri’s office, but only Katagiri can see him. Frog cites Joseph Conrad’s ideas on fear of the imagination to explain how he scared the client.
Katagiri is hesitant to join the battle, and Frog tells him that he has no choice but to fight out of responsibility and honor. No one will pity or praise them, as the battle will be waged underground without anyone’s knowledge. Katagiri claims that he is less than ordinary and lists a stream of physical, sexual, and social flaws that make him unlikeable. He declares that he has no purpose in life, and Frog retorts that only Katagiri can save Tokyo precisely for people like himself. The plan is to climb down the basement shaft of the bank the night before the earthquake and find Worm. Frog alludes to the locomotive in Anna Karenina when Katagiri asks if Frog could fight alone.
On the night of the battle, Katagiri is shot by a stranger and wakes up in the hospital the next morning, past the time of Frog’s predicted earthquake. Katagiri asks a nurse about his wound and if there had been an earthquake in Tokyo. The woman informs him that there was no earthquake and that he was never shot. He was found unconscious in the street, calling out for Frog in his sleep. Katagiri wonders if the past few days have all been a dream.
That night, Frog enters his room and informs Katagiri that he defeated Worm with Katagiri’s help. Even though Katagiri was unconscious, the fight took place in the imagination, where all battles are set. Frog cites Ernest Hemingway on the value of life being judged by defeats rather than victories. Frog recounts how Katagiri used a generator to flood the battlefield with light and overcome Worm’s darkness. The fight ended in a draw, and Frog thinks about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “White Nights.” He tells Katagiri that he feels like he is Frog and “un-Frog” (99), an enemy within himself. He claims that what one sees is not always real. Frog feels like “slowly returning to the mud” and senses a locomotive coming (99).
Frog falls into a coma, and Katagiri notices his battle wounds. Frog’s flesh suddenly breaks out into bursting boils that release a stream of writhing bugs. The creatures crawl across the room and into Katagiri’s body. Katagiri screams and wakes up as a nurse asks him if he’s had another bad dream. He tells her that what one sees is not always real, and the nurse agrees that this is especially true of dreams. Katagiri tells her that Frog sacrificed his life to save Tokyo, and she remarks that Katagiri must be fond of Frog. As Katagiri falls into a dreamless sleep, he mumbles the word “Locomotive” and asserts that he liked Frog more than anybody.
Story 5 Analysis
The story of Frog and Katagiri’s battle against Worm to save Tokyo stands apart in the collection as having the most elements of magical realism. Magical realism is a genre of fiction that depicts fantastical or supernatural elements in mundane, real-world settings. Most of Murakami’s fiction has been categorized under this genre, such as the novels Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), and Kafka on the Shore (2002). In “super-frog saves tokyo,” Frog is the most magical feature of the story as a giant, talking frog. He is polite and recognizes that Katagiri must naturally be startled and disbelieving at how outrageously fantastic Frog must seem to him. Frog offers a metatextual comment, declaring that he is not a literary device such as a metaphor or allusion and insisting, “A real frog is exactly what I am” (84). Frog’s rational and considerate behavior, such as the comical aspect of brewing tea and answering all of Katagiri’s questions, heightens the real-world situation of an uninvited guest who nonetheless observes other social conventions.
The second magical element in the story is Worm, a gigantic underground worm who feeds off anger and causes earthquakes. Worm does not appear or speak in the story, but his character highlights another aspect of magical realism, which is the incorporation of folklore. Folklore often contains a fantastical or supernatural element rooted in traditional beliefs and stories shared by a community throughout the ages. Worm is an allusion to the namazu, a giant catfish in 16th-century Japanese mythology that lives underground and causes earthquakes. The namazu appeared in many woodblock prints after the 1855 Ansei Earthquake, and according to scholar Gregory Smits, the prints depicted the namazu not only as a source of destruction but also as a leveler of social injustices. Smits argues, “For Edo residents, the quake of 1855 was an act of yonaoshi, or ‘world rectification.’ In this view, the Ansei Earthquake literally shook up a society that had grown complacent, imbalanced, and sick” (Smits, Gregory. “Shaking Up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints.” Journal of Social History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2006, p. 1046). Worm, as a version of the namazu, offers a layered interpretation in which destruction and justice intersect.
Worm is introduced as the antagonist of the story, but he is not the villain. Even Frog attests, “I feel no personal animosity toward Worm. I don’t see him as the embodiment of evil” (87). Worm’s destructive force stems from “all the different types of hatred he has absorbed and stored inside himself over the years (88). Like the namazu, Worm is an allegory of social inequalities, where buried ills and resentment erupt from below the surface of social propriety.
Worm’s destructive power is also an allegory for the individual, human psyche, where feelings of inadequacy, neglect, and dispensability are repressed in the unconscious. As Frog’s counterpart, Katagiri is the lowly loan collection officer and the epitome of the mundane, highlighting the theme of Alienation and Class Disparity in Modern Urban Society. Despite handling accounts in the millions, Katagiri lives in a “cheap apartment house” (84). He consistently performs a thankless job and is disrespected by his superiors and siblings, yet Katagiri represses his bitterness about his situation and has “never once complained” (89). Alienated from work, family, and any social life, Katagiri considers himself a “less than ordinary” person who lives “a horrible life” (93). Meek and subservient, Katagiri never protests against his mistreatment, and the battle against Worm is also a battle against Katagiri’s personal monsters. Frog contends that “Tokyo can only be saved by a person like [him]. And it’s for people like [him] that [Frog is] trying to save Tokyo” (93). Thus, fighting Worm is both a personal and political expression of agency.
Finally, “super-frog saves tokyo” is the most overtly intertextual story in the collection. Murakami often incorporates allusions to Western literature, film, and music in his fiction, as evident in the title of his novels Norwegian Wood (1987), the name of a Beatles’ song, and the previously mentioned Kafka on the Shore. In this collection, after the quake, Murakami includes two epigraphs from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils (The Possessed) (1872) and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou (Pierrot the Fool). The stories in the collection also contain overt references to American jazz (“thailand”), Jack London (“landscape with flatiron”), and another Beatles song (“honey pie”).
In “super-frog,” the narrative makes implicit references to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (1842) and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). Gogol’s short story is about a meek civil servant named Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin who attempts to build his self-esteem by purchasing an overcoat. The tale influenced Kafka’s novella about a traveling salesman named Gregor Samsa who wakes up as a giant insect. Like Katagiri, both Akaky and Gregor emphasize the dehumanizing nature of bureaucratic work and alienation within society and the family. Murakami’s story includes a reference to the world as “a great big overcoat” (88), and Frog’s gigantic stature parallels Gregor’s transformation into a human-sized insect. In addition to these implied references are direct allusions to Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Frog cites aphorisms from these authors to demonstrate his metaphysical understanding of the world, a perspective that is foreign to Katagiri’s money-lending logic of collateral and return on investment. Like folklore, philosophy and literature convey a truth and richness about a culture’s beliefs that Katagiri has neglected in his bureaucratic life.
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