Underground

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami
Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel

I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama. [7]

The drama took place on March 20, 1995. Five men, members of the Aum cult, released sarin poison gas in the Tokyo subway, killed a dozen people, and injured hundreds. Underground followed the template of Murakami's fiction: the story of ordinary men and women thrust in an abnormal situation. The difference was that it was a nightmare unfolding, as if in real time, in the real world. He did what Gabriel García Márquez accomplished in Clandestine in Chile—compress hours of interview into a compelling narrative.

The narrative was divided into short sections, focusing on a single human being and his part in the gas attack. The first part, also titled "Underground", was translated by Alfred Birnbaum. It recounted the event from the victims' point of view. To balance the story, the second part, "The Place That Was Promised", translated by Philip Gabriel, told of the stories of Aum cult members. I've yet to read the second part, but the first part was already a brilliant exploration of the outcome of terrorism.

In the first part, Murakami allowed the victims to tell the story on their own. They shared their personal backgrounds, where they came from and where they were born, their current work, the itinerary of their train rides, and what happened to them in the subway when they were exposed to sarin. For many of the victims, the attack had taken a toll on their lives. It had adversely affected their physical and mental constitutions. They are still burdened by the aftereffects of the sarin gas months after inhaling it.

The individual stories fitted snugly into Murakami's journalistic framework of conveying a macroscopic view of the nightmare. The story of the attack may have been predetermined; the outcome was all over the news. Here it was told without fanfare, and yet there are many instances in the book where I had goosebumps. Whereas some of Murakami's fiction was permeated with elements of science fiction and magic, the true story here stuck to the "truth". Ultimately, the truth is no less surreal, just like any surreal event that happens in life.

In its form and structure, Underground was reminiscent of Akutagawa Ryunosuke's story "In a Grove". Several witness are asked in a kind of deposition to recount what really happened on that day. The accumulation of the stories portrayed a kind of hell, of a nightmare experienced in broad daylight, underground.

Murakami was too entrenched in his subject to completely efface himself from the narrative. His strong opinions were shared in the prefaces of the two parts, in the introductory sections prefacing each victim's testimony, and in his summary essays at the end. In contrast to the oblique way with which he confronted the catastrophe of the Kobe earthquake in after the quake and the unconvincing war scenes in Kafka on the Shore, this work of nonfiction probed the direct infliction of cruelty, a direct confrontation with madness.

Perhaps Murakami's accomplishment here was to communicate what it really felt like to be in the middle of a tragedy. This he did with a generous amount of sympathy for the victims. In section after section, he interviewed a new face, someone with a new injury, a new perspective at what really transpired. It was a catalogue of grievances. The victims were repeating the terrorist act for the reader, over and over and over, as if drilling the same nail in the same hole.

What is the point of replaying the tragedy? What is the point of repeating for the reader the same thing in different ways? All these individual stories, what do they say? Do they add up to something coherent or graspable?

One is struck by a variety of responses to the attack: anguish, complacency, bitterness, fear, trauma. Seen from many angles, the gas attack approached a certain magnitude of reality for the reader, just as it must have had for the novelist who had to talk and listen to the victims, shaping and re-shaping the narrative in his mind.

It did not feel gratuitous or redundant to me. In the act of reading, it was as if the potent smell of the sarin gas was coming into life. The stories relived the individual responses, reactions, and sufferings; yet the collective stories were pointing to something more arresting. We are not learning something from one tragedy, one nightmare, or one moment of hell. We are reading about many tragedies, many nightmares, and many hells.

Murakami allowed the victims to assert their humanities in a world of "overwhelming violence" (his description of catastrophes in Japan, which included the 1995 Kobe earthquake and may as well include the recent earthquake and tsunami event in March and the resulting nuclear accidents). It is an uncertain world where one moment you're walking and standing free, and the next moment you are tipping over the train platform, the world literally darkening in front of you.

This is probably the finest book by Haruki Murakami that I've read. The ten works of fiction I've sampled had their brilliant moments, but they were a mixed bunch. One had the feeling that he was born to tell this story of terrorism.