Murakami's characters sense the potential liquification and...

Murakami's characters sense the potential liquification and destruction of everything. The aftershocks are psychological, and can be seen in characters who are some distance from the epicenter of the chaos in both time and space. The rifts, the fissures -- and those words are repeated often in the text -- are inside them now: there are separations and openings in their hearts, wounds and cracks in their psyches.