after the quake

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, gender discrimination, and substance use. 

“Komura’s friends and colleagues were puzzled by his marriage. Alongside him with his clean, classic good looks, his wife could not have seemed more ordinary. She was short with thick arms, and she had a dull, even stolid appearance.”

The opinions of Komura’s friends signal a society that judges one’s worth based on status and appearance. The physical description of Komura’s wife suggests that her faults, according to outsiders, lie in her lack of stereotypical feminine qualities such as delicacy and being agreeable and accommodating. The narrative continues to criticize the wife’s personality as equally “unattractive” for her quiet sullenness. The irony is that her personality traits are more an indication that she is unfulfilled in her marriage than devoid of social graces. She confesses that she finds her husband to be vacuous, whereas Komura believes her to be an acceptable wife who makes him content.

“Her clothes, her shoes, her umbrella, her coffee mug, her hair dryer: all were gone.”

Komura lists all the mundane objects that belonged to his wife that are no longer in the home. The things are insignificant, yet they serve as poignant reminders of the dissolution of his marriage and his repressed feelings of loss and rejection. Komura’s personal misfortune is contextualized in the larger national tragedy and devastation of the Kobe earthquake. In both cases, the divorce and the earthquake, Komura responds with an emotional neutrality that suppresses the pain and horror of grief and death.