Book Review – Haruki Murakami’s Underground
Review – Haruki Murakami’s Underground
The
people of terrorist attacks, which stem from breaches in the security of a city
or nation are often the last to be seen when reading about the securitization
of the world. Often times their voices are left out by those who seek to
understand their story, and the impact it has on the security of the survivors.
Haruki Murakami’s book Underground seeks to give a voice to the people affected
by the attack on the Tokyo Subway in 1994. The first part of the book was
originally published in 1997, with the testimonies of the victims of the sarin
gas attack, the second part was published in 1998 with the testimonies of those
involved with the cult Aum Shinrikyo. The translation came out two years later
giving the world a look at the victims of a crime that most didn’t know about.
The
world had images of the attacks, the testimonies of the trials but those who
lived through that day and the repercussions of a sarin gas attack. Sarin gas
is considered a weapon of mass destruction, and Murakami mentions the historical
view of how the gas was developed in the footnotes of the introduction. Yet the
instantaneous effects of the gas are terrifying for those who had never
experienced it, “Within seconds of exposure to sarin gas (or liquid, which
evaporates easily), we start to notice the immediate effects of acetylcholine
buildup. First, our smooth muscles and secretions go crazy. The nerves to those
areas keep firing, keep telling them to go. The nose runs, the eyes cry, the
mouth drools and vomits, and bowels and bladder evacuate themselves. It is not
a dignified state.” (Hamblin) What the attack did was create a dialogue about
the importance of chemical warfare within major cities around the world. The
attacks also “forced long-overdue reforms by Japanese police, and refocused
efforts by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to look more broadly at the
nature of security threats.” (Kaplan)
Often times it is said that the
people who survive the worse attacks are known to be the most resilient people
out there. They’re able to move forward, recovering fast and becoming a tougher
person than they used to be. In "Resilience and (in)security: Practices,
subjects, temporalities" the narrative is that,
“resilience redistributes responsibilities
– and possibilities of blame. It moves from government to municipalities, from
national to local, from security authorities to the citizen – expecting and
encouraging beneficial self-organization in the face of crisis by those units
that are both knowledgeable of local contexts and directly affected by the
adverse event.” (Resilience and (in)security, 7)
Yet if someone who
studies security and the resilience of the victims of such attacks took the
time out to see the progression of those who survived such horrors the outcomes
would always be different. Murakami isn’t interviewing these survivors because
of resilience but because they have a story to tell about the attack itself.
They were normal people just like those who survived the London attacks, or the
September 11th attacks. In part one of the book he goes into the
details of why he wanted to pursue this subject after reading a letter written
to Ladies’ Home Journal,
“It was from a woman whose husband had
lost his job because of the Tokyo gas attack. A subway commuter, he had been
unfortunate enough to be on his way to work in one of those cars in which sarin
gas was released. He passed out and was taken to hospital. But even after
several days’ recuperation, the aftereffects lingered on, and he couldn’t get
himself back into the working routine. At first, he was tolerated, but as time
went on his boss and colleagues began to make snide remarks. Unable to bear the
icy atmosphere any longer, feeling almost forced out, he resigned.” (Murakami,
3)
This letter in
which he read at random is what sparked his interest in pursuing the subject of
the victims, and throughout the first part of the book the narrative is about
the victims of the attack, and what their lives had become in the time after
the attacks. The first part of the book goes into the details of the lives of
34 people who were on the train that day. Their accounts of starting from the
beginning of their mornings to the strange smell of the sarin gas. The people
are the narrators of the story, Murakami is using his writing only to
transcribe the words of those he interviewed, their lives are different because
an attack of this nature has the ability to change their lives. They’re not
resilient, they’re just humans who were dealt with a horrible situation that
wasn’t predicted by the intelligence community within the borders of their
country.
The attack on several of Tokyo’s
subway lines are separated within the pages of the book, each of them tell a
story of the victims, some are told from the perspective of those they left
behind. Yoshiko Wada, is the wife of Eiji Wada a victim of the attack. What her
story tells is something different from the others because she wasn’t there,
and it’s one of the reasons why a book like this can be used to help those
grieving the loss of a loved one. She talks about how she met her husband how
they lived, and how that one day was different from all of the others. She made
him breakfast at five in the morning something she normally didn’t do; it was
out of the ordinary for the couple. Yoshiko remembered something her husband
said that morning, “If anything happens to me, you have to hand on in there and
fight.” (196) She was pregnant at the time of the attack; they were going to
have a family but unfortunately Eiji Wada was one of the twelve that didn’t
make it.
The other part of the book named
“The Place that was Promised,” is about the members of the cult group Aum
Shinrikyo, who carried out the attacks on the Tokyo subway line. Murakami had
done the one thing reporters attempt to do, he interviewed those involved,
writing that,
“the interviews in Underground and
those collected here do follow the exact same format. This time I often
interjected my own opinions, voiced doubts, and even debated various points. In
Underground I tried to keep myself in the background as much as possible, but
this time I decided to be a more active participant. Sometimes, for instance,
the conversation began to swerve too much in the direction of religious dogma,
which I felt was inappropriate.” (Murakami 249)
While those
interviews followed a more traditional route as when reporters question their
sources looking for the truth. What these interviews do is that they show the
reasons why many of these members joined the cult, what they were searching for
when they entered, and what they gained from being a part of it. The second
part of the book is smaller than the first, those who survived the attacks even
though they had been carrying sarin wrapped in newspaper were put on trial
along with the leader of the cult. What this does to the overall narrative of
the book is that it gives the reader two sides of a story, one that can be
studied and broken down. This narrative provides the part of the story many
victims of terrorism question after an attack, the questions of why? and why
me? When normally the answers aren’t revealed until long after, even though
many of the people who were on the train had refused interviews because they
feared the repercussions from the cult itself.
What makes the interviews of the
followers of Aum Shinrikyo an interesting addition is how many of those who
still followed the teaching even after the attack are shunned, they can barely
get work. Hajime Masutani a former member of the cult who was excommunicated
says that “Aum created people who had discarded their Selves and just followed
orders.” (302) He goes further into saying that those who had been deep within
the practices of Aum Shinrikyo weren’t “truly enlightened people who have
mastered the truth.” In a way looking at those who are a part of the cult is in
its own way a study of terrorist themselves, a study into those who have given
up everything for the sake of one common outcome. Those who had a part in the
attack were doing it for the sake of their leader who they believed to be a
prophet. In the end when they realized their actions they questioned him and
themselves. In "Murakami Haruki and Anna Deavere Smith: Truth by Interview”
the author writes that “After interviewing the victims of the Aum sarin gas
incident of 1995, and later the followers of the Aum Supreme Cult, he presents
us with their individual stories as a counterbalance to the stories by the
government, the police, and the media.” (Matsuoka)
What Murakami’s Underground does in analyse an event not from the perspective of
terrorism analyst or people who look at the algorithims of how such an event
can take place. It looks at those affected by the outcomes of such events, and
how resilience is in it’s own way a lie told by the media. These victims had to
endure much more than others who had faced a terrorist attack in a major city.
Jonathan Boulter’s "Writing guilt: Haruki Murakami and the archives of
national mourning” describes these events the in a way that guilt of the people
of the country is something that is at the forefront of the question of why,
“On the one hand, the events demand
memorialization, demand, that is, a mourning response; yet on the other, these
historical events, so cataclysmic, so beyond imagining, resist representation,
resist language itself. It is here, in the crucible of history’s impossible
claims, that an aporetic guilt arises for Murakami and perhaps for Japan: the
guilt of failing to imagine the possibility of trauma (“We were unable to see
them coming”) and the traumatic guilt of being unable to imagine the means to
represent the traumatic event in order properly to mourn.” (Boulter)
A person can study
an event as much as they want, they can turn over hours and hours of documents,
but how they respond to the victims and their families, to the people who work
and live in the areas effected is what will be remembered the most.
Bibliography
Boulter, Jonathan. "Writing
guilt: Haruki Murakami and the archives of national mourning."
English
Studies in Canada,
vol. 32, no. 1, 2006, p. 125+. Academic OneFile,
go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=cuny_gradctr&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA169755126&asid=01271c204265b91bdf48c55ac57edb06.
Accessed 28 June 2017.
Dunn Cavelty, Myriam, Mareile
Kaufman, and Kristain Soby Kristensen. "Resilience and
(in)security:
Practices, subjects, temporalities." Security Dialogue 46 (2015):
3-14. Web. 14 June 2017.
Frentiu,
Rodica. "Exploring the boundary between morality and religion: the
Shin-shinshukyo
(new new religions)
phenomenon and the aum anti-utopia." Journal for the Study of Religions
and Ideologies, vol. 9, no. 27, 2010, p. 46+. Academic OneFile,
go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=cuny_gradctr&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA245254770&asid=5de40c227950b719ec9632ae3a26b9bd.
Accessed 28 June 2017.
Hamblin,
James. "What Does Sarin Do to People?" The Atlantic. Atlantic
Media Company, 06
May 2013. Web. 28 June
2017.
<https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/what-does-sarin-do-to-people/275577/>.
Kaplan,
David. "Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese
Psyche.(Review)."
Japan
Quarterly 48.2 (2001): 93. Web.
Matsuoka,
N. "Murakami Haruki and Anna Deavere Smith: Truth by Interview." Comparative
Murakami,
Haruki, and Haruki Murakami. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the
Japanese
Psyche. London: Harvill, 2000. Print.
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