Ultimately, I'm still planning this essay...
At the beginning of the collections’ foremost short story, U.F.O. in Kushiro, the translation reads as follows:
> [Lisa, just **what** happened yesterday?]
>
>
> [What happened, happened]
>
> [Thats horrible, *brutal!*]
>
A quote from Dostoevsky
As in, *Notes from the Underground* writer, existentialism-writer Dostoevsky (who also wrote *Crime and Punishment*). On the topic, *Notes from the Underground* , or more focusing on its first part, *Underground*, acts as a specific deconstruction of **determinism *-*** belief of ones ability to simplify everything down to numbers; Dostoevsky argues that some actions may not simply exist to serve ones self-interest; some will do so simply to validate their existence, to protest and confirm their individuality, their ‘existence’. The narrator of the story, **The Underground Man**, ridicules the philosophical idea of another writer of his time, **Chernyshevsky**’s, *enlightened self-interest [2]-* the idea that, even while acting to help others, one only serves their own self-interest, and all actions serve ones own self-interest.
### As Wikipedia Says,
In Part 2, the rant that the Underground Man directs at Liza as they sit in the dark, and her response to it, is an example of such discourse. Liza believes she can survive and rise up through the ranks of her brothel as a means of achieving her dreams of functioning successfully in society. However, as the Underground Man points out in his rant, such dreams are based on a utopian trust of not only the societal systems in place, but also humanity's ability to avoid corruption and irrationality in general. The points made in Part 1 about the Underground Man's pleasure in being rude and refusing to seek medical help are his examples of how idealised rationality is inherently flawed for not accounting for the darker and more irrational side of humanity.
In an interview, translator Jay Rubin stated “I do not attempt to translate a sentence; I aim to translate the ‘breath’ of a sentence - the emotion behind the words”. It was one of his many responses given about how he translated the works of Haruki Murakami - from novels such as *Norwegian Wood* to short-story collections like *after the quake*. However, along with this comes the question; are there some things that cannot be translated? Through *after the quake*’s English and Japanese exploration of Dostoevsky's philosophical ideas inside *Demons* and *Notes from the Underground*, an implicit contrast between either version becomes apparent; that, along with localisation, the implicit meanings of words disappear.
*after the quake* was written ostensibly in response to Japan’s 1995 Kobe earthquake - each short story peripherally affected by the disaster. Despite this, the very first item of the text is neither referencing this disaster, nor the beginning of a short story. It is a passage taken from Dostoevsky's *Demons*. *Demons (1873)*, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is a text originally written as Dostoevsky’s rebuttal to the ever-prevailing nihilism and spread of ‘western-ideal’ coming to 1840’s Russia. That is to say, the novel is a bash of the western propagation of atheism in the youth of Russia. Through the idea that the demons throughout the book are the western philosophies of atheism, catholicism, scientism, socialism (shown poignantly through the books’ character **Stavrogin**, who, despite epitomising the extremist idea of an westernised atheist, is strucken with grief in the. face of their growing ennui from subscribing to such an ideal). As Dostoevsky stated himself, *Demons* is an extremist imagination of the Russian Man facing cultural washing due to western philosophy, and its inherent malice is depicted through its relation to the demons.
Ultimately, Dostoevsky’s view of the world contextualises an extended metaphor of *after the quake’*s short-stories; the application of oneself into physical objects. In the short-story collections opening story, UFO in Kushiro, the character Katagiri expe
Through *after the quakes* contrasting dialogues purely based off their languages way-of-speaking - and their fundamental difference of conversing the same topic - represents an implicit failure of *after the quakes* translation.
