Frog Saves Tokyi Analysis

For the preliminary paper, we were asked to read Haruki Murakami’s short story “Super Frog Saves Tokyo”, which is about an ordinary loan collector, Katagiri, who finds a giant talking frog inside his apartment one night and tells Katagiri that they are going to save Tokyo from a destructive earthquake which will be caused by the Worm. This short story was written originally for GQ magazine, but was published later along with his other short stories in a book entitled “After the Quake”, published in 2000. These short stories were written between 1999 and 2000, and were written by Murakami after the two tragedies which happened in 1995: the Great Hanshin earthquake of Kobe and the Tokyo subway series of gas attacks. “Super Frog Saves Tokyo” is

“Super Frog Saves Tokyo” cannot be easily understood with just one reading. At first, it might appear as a very weird story about a man and a frog that are off to save Tokyo. And the ending is quite confusing as well; one might think that the story was only pointing out that Katagiri has been out of his mind all along and that the Frog and the Worm are just characters inside his head. But after a few more readings and research about the background of the story, “Super Frog Saves Tokyo” shows important philosophies and insights about life which most people tend to forget at times. During the Frog and Katagiri’s first conversation, Frog mentioned about “mutual understanding is of critical importance”, that was why he encouraged Katagiri to ask as many questions as he can. This shows how important asking questions are, no matter how stupid those questions may sound. The Frog wanted to encourage Katagiri to look for the truth and satisfy himself with it. Katagiri kept quiet during their first meeting and he did not ask Frog any question so that he would not embarrass himself and Frog too. But Frog wants Katagiri to search for the answers to his questions. Life, too, has many questions that may bother us. But searching for the answers will still benefit us, and also the society, in the long