At 5:46 am on January 17, 1995, a massive earthquake measuring 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale (7.2 on the Richter scale) struck Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The Kobe earthquake, officially known as the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Disaster, lasted approximately 20 seconds and killed over 6,000 people, injured over 40,000, and left more than 300,000 displaced. Kobe, Japan’s seventh largest city with a population of 1.5 million people, located 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the epicenter, was the hardest hit city. The quake damaged highways, subways, pipelines, the port of Kobe, and commercial and residential buildings. Fires and outages of essential utility services like water, gas, and electricity exacerbated the devastation. The psychological aftershocks of the quake included “emotional numbness, the loss of the sense of reality, [and] an abnormal sense of time” (Shinfuku, Naotaka. “Disaster Mental Health: Lessons Learned From the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake.” World Psychiatry, vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 158-59). The Kobe earthquake was Japan’s second deadliest earthquake in the 20th century, preceded by the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake.

Haruki Murakami was living in the United States when the earthquake struck. Murakami was born in Kyoto and lived near Kobe, in Ashiya, as a youth before moving to Tokyo for college.