Haruki Murakami: Underground
On Monday, March 20th 2005, twelve people were killed when sarin nerve gas was released on the Tokyo underground rail system by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. More than fifty others suffered serious ill effects as a direct result of the incident, which is considered the most significant attack on Japanese soil since the Second World War. In an attempt to understand the background and convey the human cost, novelist Haruki Murakami conducted interviews with both victims of the attack and people who were members of Aum itself. Far removed from his quirky and dreamlike fiction, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is a startling and revealing piece of journalism that highlights the true cost of a terrorist act on a modern-day society.
The first half, Underground, includes interviews with a number of people who were on the Toyko subway that day; the testimonies of passengers, railway workers and bystanders were reproduced in a form that kept edits and abridgements to a minimum. The second half, The Place that was Promised, consists of similarly conducted interviews with Aum members, past and present, to give an alternate, insider’s view of the organisation that was responsible. In the editorial sections that accompany the interviews, Murakami gives his own personal views and explanations concerning how he planned and conducted the interviews.
The victims’ personal accounts are startling: every interview (some subjects used pseudonyms) begins with an introductory paragraph giving their age, occupation and the circumstances explaining how they came to be on the subway that day. This gives a significant human element to their recollections, highlighting the fact that these were real events that happened to real people and still have repurcussions to this day. Murakami says little about how these people were affected, beyond reproducing their personal recollections: such an approach, he rightly claims, would be unecessary since their stories speak very clearly for themselves.
The interviews with Aum members (some were still part of the organisation at the time of the interviews) are equally compelling, for very dfferent reasons. They vary from those who had only a passing interest in Shoko Asahara’s teachings to some who were long-standing members. Murakami does neither condone nor criticise these particular individuals’ views; he reserves his confusion and disgust at Asahara and the attack perpetrators themselves. At times he asks questions and requests clarification, but only for the benefit of his and the reader’s understanding of what the interviewee is trying to say.
Reading the victims’ testimonies in full does require patience however because the repitition begins to dull the impact of their experiences; this is obviously the opposite of what Murakami intended but it’s invevitable that the sheer scale and shocking nature of the events begins to take on a sense of unreality. No doubt it would strike more of a chord with those who live and work in Tokyo itself but the afterword Where are We Japanese Going? will be of tremendous interest to Japanese and non-Japanese alike. Murakami suggests that the underlying reasons surrounding the attack have not been addressed in full, and the resulting social commentary is a rare and fascinating analysis on how the attack has affected perceptions. In today’s social and political climate, the issue of terrorism and religion are no less significant issues; if anything, the underlying cause of the attack, the way in which it was handled by the emergency services and covered by the media, is even more relevant in 2007 than it was in 1995.
The single most important thing Underground… achieves as a whole (the second half was written later in answer to public response to the first; the English language edition combines both in one volume) is that it is surprisingly impartial. Murakami is a reporter and researcher rather than writer; he makes a great effort to prevent his own personal viewpoints clouding the issues raised, of which there are many. It is ultimately up to the reader to digest the information, to judge the perpetrators and understand the plight of the victims; he tried to paint a picture of what really happened and why. What happened in the Tokyo subway in 1995 was shocking but the most frightening thing is how apparently easily it came to pass, and the possibility that it could happen somewhere, and sometime, again.
In Summary
The thorough nature of the testimonies and background information may be heavy-going for readers who only have a casual interest in the Tokyo gas attack and its after-effects but the power and personal nature of their stories, as well as the way in which they are presented, make for compelling reading. The Aum cult is still in operation, albeit in a very different guise, and terrorism is one of the most topical issues in the world today - this makes for an additional reason why Underground is a very relevant and gripping read.
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