The Beat February 2003

Underground
By Haruki Murakami
Reviewed by John Bocskay
Sponsored by Kyobo Bookstore

On March 20, 1995, five two-man teams, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, released deadly sarin gas on five different trains in the Tokyo Underground. The results were tragic; twelve dead and thousands wounded, many grievously.

Japanese (and world) media watched in horror, and devoted thousands of pages of press to this most horrible act of terrorism on Japanese soil, yet Haruki Murakami was left with an unanswered question – What actually happened down there? What did those people on the trains think, see, feel, experience? He wrote Underground to answer this question, and out of a compulsion to get to truly get to know his estranged country, Japan. The result is a study of the Japanese psyche, viewed through the window of the most serious terror attack on Japanese soil; an oral history, in the style of Studs Terkel, from one of the world‘s most inventive novelists.

He interviewed survivors of the attacks, families of the deceased, and current and former members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, whose upper echelon perpetrated the attack. The result is a kaleidoscopic narrative, at turns illuminating and contradictory, yet with a relentless coherence and strange symmetry of its own. It is a narrative told from multiple viewpoints, the shifting ground on which Murakami the novelist is very much at home.

As with his novels, there is a fascination with the underground, a subterranean world where things are not as they seem. It is dark and frightening, and the world as we know it no longer exists. He goes there however to find the “real Japan”, and it is precisely this juxtaposition that offers him the clarity he seeks. To better understand the system, he aims his lens at the system breaking down, and it is only as it falls apart that we see what it is.

There are stories of heroism: Tokyo emergency services were overwhelmed and found themselves unprepared for a disaster of this magnitude. As a result, many people formed impromptu emergency teams, relaying fallen people from the subways, driving them to hospitals, and risking their own lives to pull the afflicted from the stations and trains.

And the darker side: Passersby walking by in astonishment, but walking by nonetheless, on their way to work. Even many of the victims, some of whom would be later hospitalized for weeks, speak of getting to work as the foremost things in their minds; carrying out their duties, pressing on with normal life as if nothing was seriously wrong. Some crawling to work as their muscles and breathing slowly fail. Bizarre scenes of subway cars, everyone coughing, and no one really panicking, even as the bodies started hitting the floor. A man asks a policeman a simple question, “Which hospital should I take this man to?” The policeman takes ten minutes to answer because he calls headquarters for the appropriate answer. The man in need of a hospital would later die on his way there. Through stories like these, we see the oft-heralded Japanese sobriety and attention to protocol in an otherworldly setting, where it becomes part of the nightmare.

Underground is full of pathos; writes Murakami, this is “not a subject one toys around with.” There is still the macabre fascination we have with great tragedies, though with Murakami we don‘t feel as if we‘re rubbernecking. His motives are to record the tragedy in a way no one had attempted – through the eyes and minds of the people on the trains -- and to draw lessons from it. As a character study of the Japanese as a society, it has much to tell. The glass is dark and the mirror cracked, but the overall image reflected is oddly sharp and cohesive.