Any shared human experience that inspires terror and rips communities asunder makes for powerful metaphor: a terrorist attack; a tsunami; an earthquake.

Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote “after the quake,” a collection of six short stories, following the deadly Kobe earthquake in 1995. Though his characters do not directly experience the earthquake, their lives are all profoundly influenced by the catastrophic event, which becomes a metaphor for social and political upheaval, paralyzing grief and the interpersonal tremors that erupt daily in our lives.

Two of these stories have been adapted for the stage by Frank Galati, in a moving and graceful production now at La Jolla Playhouse. Galati, who adapted a Tony Award-winning production of “The Grapes of Wrath” for LJP audiences in 1989, delicately interweaves the stories, resulting in a surprisingly funny and heartwarming tale of loss, alienation, fear and courage.

The story that forms the framework of the play, “honey pie,” involves three friends from college in a love triangle of sorts. Junpei is an awkward, shy fiction writer who has kept quiet about his love for Sayoko. Gregarious Katagiri, unplagued by such self-doubts, made his move and got the girl. Now in their mid-30s, Sayoko and Katagiri have split, yet Junpei still cannot bring himself to confess his love for Sayoko. The play opens a month after the Kobe quake, as Junpei consoles Sayoko’s daughter, who suffers from nightmares involving an “earthquake man” who wants to lock her into a tiny box.

Embedded within this story is “super-frog saves tokyo,” in which a giant frog enlists the help of an unassuming and timid bank collections officer to stop a giant subterranean worm from starting an earthquake and wreaking havoc on Tokyo. This is pure Murakami, whose works are known for fantastical elements.

The most widely read Japanese writer outside of Japan, Murakami gained international recognition in 1987 with “Norwegian Wood,” a nostalgic story of loss and burgeoning sexuality, followed by “Sputnik Sweetheart” and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” His surreal stories mix the supernatural with the mundane amid an emotional landscape of regret, isolation, a longing for love, mystery and deadpan humor. His characters are ordinary people to which very unusual things happen.

Much of Murakami’s works are deceptively simple. The plots are straightforward, but the stories touch on deeply human emotional experiences. Galati guides the play with a similar economy of style: the barely there set design neatly reflects Murakami’s spare language and costumes are generally muted of color.

One area that seems especially lush in this unadorned production is the musical landscape. Jason McDermott on cello and Jeff Wichmann on koto provide the live soundtrack, evocative of both East and West. Playing original music by Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman, as well as bits of classical and pop songs, the affecting and lingering notes function as another form of storytelling.

The LJP production of “after the quake” features the cast that originated the roles at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in October 2005. They, too, match the tone of Murakami’s text with understated performances.

Hanson Tse and Aiko Nakasone play the restrained lovers with tenderness and palpable attraction. Andrew Pang does double duty as Katagiri and the bank collections agent, conjuring such different personas you may not realize it’s the same actor at first. Ditto for Keong Sim, playing narrator and giving a physically astute and humorous turn as the giant frog (aptly named Frog). With just some green gloves, green glasses and green socks, he transforms thoroughly into the sophisticated amphibian fond of quoting literary luminaries such as Dostoevsky, Hemingway and Conrad. Eight-year-old Kayla Lauren Mei Mi Tucker is adorable as the precocious Sala, whose imaginative fears can only be conquered by inventing new stories.

Many of the characters in the play are frozen by their fears. Murakami draws a connection between everyday courage -- speaking the truth, connecting with others, personal sacrifice -- and the kind of heroics it takes to do battle with a giant worm. Just as it sometimes takes great calamities to put lives into perspective and realign priorities, personal quakes are sometimes necessary to goad us into action.

The script does have some weaknesses. It is prone to excessive narration, typically a liability in theater. Director Galati largely overcomes this by keeping the narration fluid. Characters relate their own stories in third person, then switch to first person or address each other rather than the audience. The character of Sayoko is also underdeveloped, with little sense of why either of these two young men might fall in love with her.

But mostly the play is a lovely staging of Murakami’s rich, poetic stories in a dreamlike rumination on the fragility of human connectedness.