UBC: Murakami, Underground

[truepenny]

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

[library]

This is a book about the sarin attack in the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995. As you would expect from Murakami, it is thoughtful and careful. It consists primarily of interviews; the first part, Underground, is interviews with survivors; the second part, The Place that was Promised, is interviews with members and former members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult responsible for the attacks.

The translation, insofar as I can judge, seems good. I hope it's accurate. The one thing I would have liked was for more Japanese words to be included along with their translations--there are several words that get used frequently by the interview subjects that I would like to have the original word for, simply because they seem so important. That's a quibble, not a real defect in the translation, and is probably highly idiosyncratic.

I have two reactions to this book. One is the writer's reaction to everything, including their own personal disasters of overwhelming magnitudes: how can I use this in a story? It always feels like a callous and insensitive reaction, and I'm generally reluctant to articulate it for that reason, but it's actually the opposite, because it's asking, how can I take this experience into myself and turn it into something I can send out again that other people can read and understand and empathize with? Which insofar as I'm willing to argue for a higher purpose to storytelling (aside from just, people need stories to stay alive and sane), is the higher purpose I would argue for. So, yeah, on that level, this is a great book for worldbuilding writers to read to understand the depth and complexity that our worldbuilding most often lacks. I say this not to equate modern Japan with an imaginary country, but to say that our imaginary countries need to aspire to be as deep as Japan is in Murakami's work here (yes, that's a pun; yes, I meant it). If art is going to imitate life, it needs to do so consciously and carefully and with the best understanding we can bring to the table of what we're trying to imitate. And it works better if we read about a city we don't know so that our own familiarity doesn't blind us to how much information is being presented. I don't know a great deal about Japanese society in general, or the city of Tokyo in particular, so this was a window on an alien world for me (using "alien" in the Ruth-amidst-the-alien-corn sense, not the aliens-from-outer-space sense), and I found it fascinating. As someone who's trying right now to invent a city that has a true, deep, four-dimensional presence in my narrative, this was a kind of textbook of all the things I need to think about and understand to make that kind of verisimilitude possible.

This book was an amazing worldbuilding demonstration, though, precisely because Murakami isn't worldbuilding at all. He's telling us (and here I mean "us" as both Japanese readers and the Anglophone readers of the translation) about a real place and real people and a real tragedy that happened in 1995. He's not trying to present 1995 Tokyo to readers of a novel; he's trying to come to grips with a terrible event in his own life and his country's life.

(This is why you should occasionally branch out into nonfiction, even if you write fantasy, so that you get Tokyo, for example, as it was in 1995, not Tokyo as filtered through a writer's imagination and tailored to the needs of a story.)

And that's where the writer's reaction blends into the reader's reaction, which is that this is a fascinating book about a terrible tragedy. Murakami admits he's an amateur interviewer, which he makes up for by being patient and thorough and manifestly a good listener. The survivors' accounts are vivid and telling: they capture how tragedy enters your life without your suspecting its existence and how it alienates you from your own life. Also how confusing a disaster is as it unfolds. (Which is a pretty good practical takeaway, if you need one.)

The Aum Shinrikyo interviews are equally fascinating, partly because of the way that Aum's Cloud Cuckooland morphed from utopia to dystopia with almost no one even noticing. None of Murakami's interviewees had ANY IDEA that their leadership was planning to plant packets of sarin in the Tokyo subway (and I do in fact believe that they did not know). These people, both those who remain in Aum and those who have left it, are almost all absolutely baffled at how something that was so meaningful and valuable to them could possibly have resulted in the calculated monstrosity of the sarin attack. (A very few of them saw Mr Hyde behind Aum's beaming Jekyll-Buddha face before 1995 03 20, but even they didn't know the scope of the rottenness at Aum's core, and they clearly can't find a story that makes sense of it.) So on the one hand, there's a very serious discussion about Buddhism and asceticism and the perceived brokenness of Japanese culture that carries through several of the interviews; on a second hand there's a patchwork description of the inner workings of a cult; and on a third hand there are a series of intensely personal discussions about belief and disillusionment. Murakami captures snapshots of people at every point along that progression, from those who are still trying to salvage Aum Shinrikyo as a movement to those who have denounced it along with its founder. All of them are struggling to reintegrate in any way at all with the world outside Aum, especially given the police persecution they were continuing to suffer in 1997 & 1998 when Murakami was doing his interviews. (Every time they find jobs, the police come along and tell their employers about their affiliation with Aum, and bang! there they are out of a job again. At least in 1998, they were remaining very insular, mostly existing in a bootstrap economy with other outcasts and refugees from Aum.)

Murakami's sections of meta, about the interview process and his own experience, are thoughtful and compassionate. He can't make sense of what happened, any more than the survivors and the members and ex-members of Aum can, but I feel like this book does succeed in framing the mystery at its center so that we understand the dimensions of the thing that we cannot comprehend.



View all my reviews