IT’S SHOCKING TO ADMIT that the Japanese earthquake is just a day shy of being month-old news. It’s also hard to admit that, as in every Man v. Nature narrative, the moral of the story is completely absent. All we have are aftershocks.

By SUSANNA JONES [New Statesman] – It will take generations for the north-eastern communities to recover. What will be the effect on Japan as a whole? Rather than immersing ourselves in the language of horror films and the end of the world, when the time is right to try to glimpse this new territory, we might for thought reach for a book by Japan’s most popular contemporary novelist. Haruki Murakami’s slim collection of short stories, After the Quake, published in English in 2002, was written in response to, but not directly about, the Kobe earthquake. From the painful to the surreal to the gently touching, the anthology presents a series of psychological aftershocks.

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There is talk of panic in Tokyo now, but the news I’ve had from friends there – phone calls, emails, Facebook updates – paints a sombre yet calmer picture. They are worried but not hysterical. Transport is running, though not at full capacity. At schools around the city, classes continue and students in their final year are having their graduation ceremonies as the academic calendar comes to its end. They are aware of radiation levels from the blasts at the Fukushima nuclear plant and that so far there is no risk to health. They are going about their business, getting on with it. Their concern is for the communities further north.

Perhaps not everyone is so calm – why should they be? – but we should resist the temptation to imagine panicking hordes buying up all the food and fleeing the capital as the next part of our horror narrative….

That evening [of March 11], many inhabitants of Tokyo were in the strange situation of sleeping in schools and other emergency shelters because they could not get home, yet were in no danger. I heard of people who walked through the night to collect their children from school, knowing that, further north, by a freak of nature, many thousands were dead.

It may be a long time before we see or understand the long-term effects of these events on Japanese culture. In Japan change tends to happen not dramatically or quickly, but quietly and with small shifts. It seems incongruous that, inthe midst of this great catastrophe, the cherry blossoms will soon be out.

Continued at the New Statesman | More Chronicle & Notices.