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

Japanese writers have a tough time breaking into the American market, for no explicable reason. Shusaku Endo, despite grappling with themes such as faith, family and Christianity — themes hardly foreign to Western audiences — was never more than a blip on the screens of serious American and European critics. Kenzaburo Oe, despite winning the Nobel Prize, barely registers with even the most well-informed readers over here.

Haruki Murakami is intent on changing that. Murakami, already a prolific writer in his native language, has been heavily translated into English as of late, with the appearance of two short stories in the New Yorker over the last 6 months and the publication of two novels within a year — "Norwegian Wood" last year and "Sputnik Sweetheart" later this month. He recently held a writer-in-residence post at Princeton. He is outspoken about his love for all things American, and all his novels make heavy use of American pop cultural themes.

However, Murakami's latest effort — "Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche" — is not likely to help him in his quest. The book is a compendium of 42 first-person accounts of the attack, accounts ranging from station attendants, passengers and family members to various members of cult behind the attack, and they are delivered without interruption or authorial direction. At first interesting, the stories begin to run together, and completing the book could prove tedious for anyone but the most dedicated Nipponophile.

The gas attack was carried out on March 20, 1995 by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, a shadowy organization whose leader, Shoko Asahara, had declared a pre-emptive strike against what he saw as a materialistic society bent on destroying spirituality. Aum teams struck seven different subway lines, all of them by dropping bags of liquid sarin — a deadly nerve gas developed during World War I — wrapped in newspaper and then puncturing them with sharpened umbrella tips. 12 people died and hundreds were injured, many suffering long-term nerve damage. Dozens of Aum members were arrested and tried; four of the assailants were sentenced to death, along with three members of the leadership. Asahara is still in trial.

Murakami writes in the preface that the motivation to write "Underground" came from what he saw as the failure of the Japanese media to cover the story from the perspective of the Japanese public, preferring instead to focus on the weird world of the Aum cult. "The average citizen … was almost an afterthought," he writes. For him, such myopia is endemic of a culture afraid to admit its own neuroses; Murakami wants "Underground" to show that the attack wasn't some freak crime perpetrated by outsiders, but the result of forces working within Japanese society.

Murakami's interviews reveal a Japan populated by lonely, alienated people, people locked into a massive industrial society yet at the same time cut loose from family and tradition by the juggernaut of modernization that swept over the country in the post-WWII era. It is a theme that appears in most of his books, and its expression in these real-life accounts should gain Murakami respect as a social critic as well as a writer.

"Underground" gives a keen insight into a culture most Westerners are never able to penetrate. But to get there, one has to wade though dozens of personal accounts, accounts that at times vary only in the age and occupation of the narrator. By the fifth or sixth account of the Chiyoda Line attack (which often differ in no more than the occupation of the witness and minute variations in the individual stories), for example, the reader is begging for Murakami to step in, to break things off and get to the point.

Needless to say, "Underground" was read much differently in Japan; its resonance resembled the collection of the hundreds of personal accounts flowing from the Oklahoma City bombing. The attack was the kind of deep social wound that a book can do so much to salve, and yet is at the same time so complex, so bound up between personal disaster and social tragedy, that it is impossible for an outsider to insert himself. What comes across as drudgery to us is a form of bitter catharsis to the Japanese. "Underground" makes a good case for Murakami as the social conscience of modern, urban Japan. But it will do little if anything to improve his standing among American audiences.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)