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Post-apocalyptic fictions are often read as mirrors of culture, showing socio-political tension and ecological anxiety in a form that continues to be remembered long afterwards. This paper undertakes a comparative study of Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007) and three stories from Haruki Murakami’s after the quake (2000) — “ufo in kushiro,” “super-frog saves tokyo,” and “honey pie” — to examine how Indian and Japanese post-apocalyptic writing confront trauma and environmental memory through distinct cultural and historical contexts. Sinha’s novel is narrated by a young man who was left physically disabled by the Bhopal gas leak and who is residing in Khaufpur, a fictional city. Through him, Sinha explores environmental injustice, corporate wrongdoing, and the resilience of people whose voices usually go unheard. Murakami’s short stories take place in the weeks right after the Kobe earthquake of 1995, and register catastrophe less as a direct event than as a psychic aftershock, working through fragmentation, allegory, and the slow transformation of ordinary life. Reading Sinha through Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence and Murakami through Cathy Caruth’s theory of trauma and belated address, the paper argues that Indo-Japanese post-apocalyptic literature converts disaster into cultural memory through markedly different narrative strategies — lived testimony and political critique in Sinha, allegorical displacement and quiet transformation in Murakami — while arriving at a shared vision of survival, ethical responsibility, and the reimagining of the future in the twenty-first century.
Maryam Fatimi. “Disaster as Cultural Memory: A Comparative Ecocritical Study of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 1185-1197. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.73.
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