The salesman arrives, hands over the package, winds up in bed with a friend of the sister and tells her about his wife's note. "I may have nothing inside me," he says, "but what would something be?" Only then does he get around to wondering what's in the box, and to wondering why he hasn't wondered about it earlier. "I'll tell you why," says the woman. "It's because that box contains the something that was inside you. You just didn't know that when you carried it here and gave it to Keiko with your own hands. Now, you'll never get it back." That's how easily life in Murakami's stories glides from domestic travail to the edge of an uncanny abyss.

This is a slim book, but you'll need to read it twice. The stories are connected overtly by the Kobe disaster (they all occur during the following month), but also in a dozen subterranean ways -- motifs like bears, snakes, frogs and boxes keep floating to the surface and sinking back down again. The subconscious is Murakami's natural habitat, and sometimes these stories seem to be dreaming of each other, their elements taking on different forms, picking up the threads dropped earlier. They are enigmatic without being obscure; by the second reading you'll know what the author is trying to say, even if you can't quite nail it down in so many words.

Murakami's characters are like everyone else -- haunted by old losses and betrayals, afraid of being trapped, perplexed by the demands life makes of them. A story like "Honey Pie," about a writer's emergence from a detachment he only thinks has been imposed upon him, is entirely realistic, but the child in it has nightmares about the "Earthquake Man," a bogeyman ("tall and skinny and old") who wants to stuff people into impossibly tiny boxes.
On the other hand, in the weirdly heartbreaking "Superfrog Saves Tokyo," Mr. Katagiri, the "assistant chief of the Lending Division of the Shinjuku branch of the Tokyo Security Trust Bank," is visited at his bachelor apartment by an enormous and very noble frog. The frog, named Frog, needs the support of Katagiri in his epic battle with Worm, an underground serpent who threatens to destroy Tokyo with another quake, this one to be set off by Worm's irate, mindless writhings. Why Katagiri? It turns out that Frog has been watching the bank officer's life of unsung decency. "To be quite honest, Mr. Katagiri," says the gigantic amphibian, "you are nothing much to look at, and you are far from eloquent, so you tend to be looked down upon by those around you. I, however, can see what a sensible and courageous man you are." Perhaps this story sounds preposterous, but somehow, after the first few pages, it's not.

Our next pick: A family finds gems, mystery and adulterous passion on the island of Elba
BESCHRIEB SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
Twenty-two-year-old Simire is in love for the first time - with a woman 17 years her senior. But whereas Miu is a glamorous and successful older woman with a taste for classical music and fine wine, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel.

One of the writers said she didn't think it was possible just yet to do anything about an event of that magnitude in fiction. Another offered the example of "UFO in Kushiro," a story in a recent issue of the New Yorker by the gifted Japanese novelist and story writer Haruki Murakami. It begins with images of the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake -- "crumpled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways" -- and introduces us to a woman so shattered by this natural disaster that she picks herself up, packs and abandons her marriage, leaving her husband to find his way through a world he first believes to be empty of possibility.

That narrative action, that of the accidental turn, in this case the earthquake, that leads to new fortune, recurs in a number of these wonderfully inventive stories. In "Thailand," a lonely and burned-out Japanese doctor, an expert on diseases of the thyroid, takes a colleague's advice and takes a vacation in the countryside of that Southeast Asian nation. Her connection to the Kobe quake seems tenuous at first. A man she despises for reasons that eventually become clear lived in Kobe, and she hopes he has died there. While in Thailand the doctor does nothing to change her life, just swims and reads and eats, while her driver delivers himself of portentous disquisitions.

So the earthquake at Kobe is an occasion for philosophical speculation as well as psychological disruption. But it's also a source of prophecy, as in the reading an old Thai peasant medium gives the Japanese doctor ("there is a stone inside your body. A hard white stone. About the size of a child's fist. .

. . There is something written on the stone . . . small black characters of some kind. The stone and its inscription are old, old things. . . . You must get rid of the stone. Otherwise, after you die and are cremated, only the stone will remain.")

Pie," threatening to stuff her into a little box and yanking so hard on her arm her joints crack. The lonely but successful short-story writer Junpei, the main character of this story, finds himself in love with the frightened child's mother, who is married to his best friend. Junpei is also affected by the quake more than he cares to admit.

"Whenever anyone mentioned the earthquake," Murakami writes, "he would clam up. It was an echo from a past he had buried long ago. He hadn't set foot on those streets since his graduation, but still, the sight of the destruction laid bare raw wounds hidden somewhere deep inside him. The lethal, gigantic catastrophe seemed to change certain aspects of his life, quietly, but from the ground up. . . . I have no roots, he thought. I'm not connected to anything."

geological and psychological and mythological. We know he deploys a successful style in his fiction "which enabled him to transform the most deeply reverberating sounds and subtle gradations of light and color into concise, convincing prose."

However, in his life, he has been ineffectual, if not a complete mess. Not until his best friend and the love of his life end their marriage does he seize something valuable from the ruins and devise a new aesthetic ("I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love") and a forceful new way of living: "But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl . . . even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar."

These stories, both mysterious and yet somehow quite familiar, may have the same effect on you, living, as we aall are now, with the possibility of imminent disaster.