61 pages • 2 hours read
after the quake
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Story 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 3 Summary: “All God’s Children Can Dance”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of pregnancy termination, suicidal ideation, and sexual content.
Yoshiya wakes up with a terrible hangover and is late again for his job. He is 25 years old and lives with his religious mother, Miss Osaki, who is out of town on an earthquake relief mission. They live in Asayaga, a residential neighborhood in Tokyo. Commuting home on the subway late that night, Yoshiya sees a man in his mid-fifties with a missing earlobe and follows him. He believes that the man may be his estranged father.
Miss Osaki was 18 when she had Yoshiya, and she raised him on her own. She claimed that his literal father was God, who watched over him from heaven. Mr. Tabata, the man responsible for his mother’s religious conversion, warned Yoshiya that if he were to lose his faith, his father would never appear to him. As a child, Yoshiya did not feel exceptional. He prayed to his father for the ability to catch fly balls during his baseball games, but God never answered. Mr. Tabata scolded him not to test God for tangible goals.
When Yoshiya was in middle school, his eccentric mother would often walk around the house with little or no clothes on and crawl into his bed on cold nights. Yoshiya feared being aroused by his mother and sought out sexual relief through pornography. As an adult, he wanted to move out but worried about his mother’s well-being and didn’t want to cause her heartache. When he was 13 and renounced his faith, she neglected to eat and bathe for weeks. Yoshiya used to feel pride in his mother’s missionary work, but when God never appeared to him, he abandoned religion with the impression that his father was cold and had a “heart of stone” (52).
When Yoshiya was 17, his mother told him that in her youth, she “had knowledge” (her euphemism for sex) of men she didn’t love and had two abortions (47). The obstetrician lectured her for not using contraception properly, but his mother insisted that she had. She ended up dating the doctor, a man whose earlobe was missing due to a childhood attack from a dog, and became pregnant. He claimed that his contraceptive techniques were flawless and denied paternity. In despair, Miss Osaki tried to die by suicide but was stopped by Mr. Tabata, a passerby. He convinced her that all her pregnancies had been God’s will. Yoshiya’s mother became a staunch believer and never told the doctor that she had a child. She is adamant that Yoshiya is truly a son of God, though Yoshiya is certain that the doctor is his biological father.
Yoshiya follows the man with the missing earlobe onto a train and continues to trail him in a taxi. The streets just outside Tokyo are desolate and dotted with factories along the river. The cabs stop outside a high stretch of concrete wall crowned with barbed wire. The man walks mechanically, and Yoshiya follows him into a scrapyard, down a dark, narrow alley, and finally through a small opening in a sheet metal fence. On the other side, Yoshiya finds himself standing in an open baseball field with the man nowhere to be seen.
Yoshiya stands in the cold silence and thinks about Mr. Tabata’s claim that God will reveal himself one day. Mr. Tabata died a painful death from cancer, and Yoshiya wonders if the devout man ever prayed for God to heal him or if he never dared to test God. Yoshiya’s head throbs as he wonders why he pursued the stranger. Did he hope to gain closure or a new identity? He concludes that chasing after the man is like chasing after a darkness inside himself. He realizes that finding his father, God, or the man made no difference.
Yoshiya stands on the pitcher’s mound, winding his arms as his body warms up and his headache dissipates. He thinks about an old girlfriend who nicknamed him “Super-Frog” for the way he flailed as he danced (57). Yoshiya is no longer self-conscious about his dancing and enjoys the feeling of letting go. He begins to dance on the mound. He is certain that someone is watching him, but he no longer cares. Yoshiya feels as though he has been trekking through an internal forest filled with dangerous beasts of his own making. He thinks about his mother’s comment that God made him well-endowed as a sign, but all he wanted was the ability to catch fly balls.
Yoshiya stares at the ground and imagines it vibrating with deep, dark secrets. He thinks about the earthquake’s destruction as a punishment for imagining what it would be like to travel back in time and sleep with his young mother. On his deathbed, Mr. Tabata confessed that he had desired Miss Osaki and begged for forgiveness. Yoshiya thinks to himself that there was nothing to forgive. He believes that “hearts are not stones” and that “[a]ll God’s children can dance” (60). Yoshiya kneels on the mound and says, “Oh God.”
Story 3 Analysis
The story is about a young man’s metaphoric journey into his unconscious and his confrontation with repressed desires and fears. Yoshiya is a protagonist haunted by anxieties about an absent father and a sexualized mother. His distress recalls fundamental Freudian complexes about identity and the unconscious (see The Interpretation of Dreams), particularly the conflation of his father’s identity with that of God and the incestuous undercurrent with his mother. The story is profuse with Freudian symbolism, from references to castration in “the man with the missing earlobe” to a preoccupation with Yoshiya’s large penis size (44). The references create a psychoanalytic landscape that emphasizes Yoshiya’s multiple crossings into a disorienting space where his deepest secrets lie. The story exemplifies the theme of The Journey Into the Unconscious.
The story’s primary action begins when Yoshiya follows a man whom he believes may be his estranged father. He takes a journey into the uncanny as he trails the man with a missing earlobe down increasingly darker and narrower portals, a surreal path that evokes comparisons to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and recalls the collection’s motif of walls and boundaries representing the passage into the unconscious. Even before his physical journey, the story begins with an ambiguous state of consciousness that accentuates the story’s dreamlike tone. Yoshiya awakes with a pounding hangover and struggles to find his bearings. Neither fully awake nor fully asleep, he has images of “[r]andom but persistent streams of clear light and white smoke swirled together inside his eyes, which g[i]ve him a strangely flat view of the world” (43). Yoshiya’s literal perspective is clouded and distorted, suggesting that his journey into his mind began long before he steps foot on the subway.
As the son of a devout mother, Yoshiya was raised to believe that his literal father was God, an omnipotent but absent figure who held the ultimate authority in his life. Yoshiya’s obedience to religion was predicated on a fear of abandonment; if he were to “test” God’s existence (46), he would disappoint his father and nullify any chances of ever meeting him. Yoshiya explains that he renounced his faith when “he awakened to the existence of his own independent ego, [and] he found it increasingly difficult to accept the strict codes of the sect that clashed with ordinary values” (52). Religion had kept Yoshiya from interacting with the world as an active subject whose decisions and consequences stem from his free will rather than a higher power.
At the same time, Yoshiya never fully rejected the idea that God had in fact abandoned him. One of the driving decisions for his renunciation was the “unending coldness of the One who was his father: His dark, heavy, silent heart of stone” (52). Yoshiya struggles to reconcile his incompatible desire to be autonomous and his longing for a father’s love. When Yoshiya impulsively follows the man on the train, he acknowledges that “the man ha[s] no idea that this son of his even exist[s]. Nor would he be likely to accept the facts if Yoshiya were to reveal them to him there and then” (50). The comment reveals Yoshiya’s longing for recognition and acceptance of his existence. The desire to find his father becomes a symbolic, internal quest to find himself.
In the story’s conclusion, Yoshiya makes it to “the other side” and enters his unconscious mind (54). Yoshiya’s deepest impulses and wishes culminate in the symbolic setting of a baseball field from his childhood. The site represents Yoshiya’s innocent wish to feel special and no longer “a little bit less than ordinary” (46). Yoshiya had prayed to catch a fly ball and earn the admiration and praise of his peers. The baseball field was also the setting for his test to God and a confirmation, in his child’s mind, that he was indeed unworthy of his father’s love when he failed to catch the ball each time. A section of ground in the field is described as a “scar” (54), emphasizing the setting as a wound from the past that has left its mark.
When Yoshiya returns to this site of trauma as an adult, the confrontation provides him with an overwhelming sense of relief and freedom. The man with the missing earlobe disappears from sight, and Yoshiya is left alone to reflect on his repressed longing to find his father. He reaches an epiphany that searching for his father was, in the end, a search for himself. It no longer matters to him who his father is, “just as the question of whether he c[an] catch an outfield fly ha[s] ceased to be a matter of life and death to him anymore” (56). The baseball field, once a very public and psychological site of humiliation and rejection, becomes Yoshiya’s personal dance floor. As he “let[s] himself go and move[s] his body in time to the music, he [] come[s] to feel that the natural rhythm inside him [i]s pulsing in perfect unison with the basic rhythm of the world” (57). Yoshiya no longer cares if he is being watched or judged, and he feels a profound sense of connection and belonging as he dances, highlighting the theme of The Arts as a Source of Self-Discovery and Renewal.
The story ends with an ambiguous final scene where Yoshiya kneels on the mound and calls out, “Oh God” (60). After his cathartic dance and renewed sense of self-awareness, the words no longer connote an invocation to an external, higher power that punishes and denies. Rather, Yoshiya’s exclamation represents a joyous acknowledgement of the divine in himself. The second to final lines allude to Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass (1855), a work that exults in the spiritual interconnectedness of the individual and nature. Murakami writes, “A gust of wind set the leaves of grass to dancing and celebrated the grass’s song before it died” (60). Like the dancing blade of grass, Yoshiya expresses joy in his resilience and freedom.
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