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The date is March 20, 1995. It is a beautiful clear spring morning. There is still a brisk breeze and people are bundled up in coats. Yesterday was Sunday, tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, a national holiday. Sandwiched right in the middle of what should have been a long weekend, you're probably thinking, "I wish I didn't have to go to work today." No such luck. You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a perfectly run-of-the-mill day. Until a man in disguise pokes at the floor of the car with the sharpened tip of his umbrella, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid … —Haruki Murakami, Underground
As our triple tragedy of September 11 slips backward in time, the process of national self-examination set in motion that day has narrowed to a few well-worn themes—"homeland security," "Arab rage," "the conflict of civilizations," the alleged failures of U.S. foreign policy, and so on—retailed again and again to dwindling attention. Clearly we need some new angles to take the measure of what happened and learn from it.
One such vantage point might be found in the experience of another liberal democracy, Japan, hit by a weapon of mass destruction in March 1995. Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released the deadly nerve gas, sarin, at several points in the Tokyo subway system. The death toll was mercifully low—eleven people died—but more than 5,000 were affected by the gas, many of them suffering lasting physical harm, not to mention the psychological impact.
While the attack and its aftermath were widely covered in the media, most Americans will have only hazy recollections of the event. That can be remedied by a reading of Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, an extraordinary book by the contemporary Japanese novelist most widely known in the West.
Underground compiles the recollections and reflections of close to 40 persons, drawn from a larger number of interviews. Many are victims of the attack or relatives thereof; others are current or (mostly) former members of Aum. Their feelings were garnered by Murakami and his tape recorder in the year after the attack. Murakami the fiction writer does not pretend to be a criminologist, sociologist, political scientist, or judge, but in addition to the interviews he offers his own thoughts on the meaning of the attack and the public response to it.
American readers may especially appreciate the author's attentiveness to, and concern for, the survivors. It is absolutely necessary to remember the dead, as The New York Times has nobly done for the victims of 9/11. But too few studies are done, and too few stories are written, about the damaged survivors of such attacks. For decades there will be survivors of Aum's attack: the badly injured who will never move as well; the lesser-hurt who remain beset by strange sufferings; and people whose ruin was more emotional than physical. By contrast, the attacks in America left far more dead than injured. But both nations will be dealing for years with the post-traumatic stress of survivors and the desolation of the victims' relatives.
The attacks on Tokyo and the United States were in some ways remarkably similar. Both were planned by religiously motivated leaders who commanded absolute devotion. Both Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum, and Osama bin Laden were able to attract to their cause intelligent young men with advanced technical training. The larger aim of the attack in Japan was to hurry a supposedly impending apocalypse by wrecking the ministries of state in the capital. The operation in Tokyo aimed directly at the Kasumigaseki, where stand central police offices as well as ministries of trade and industry, finance, foreign affairs, etc. The economy would also be slammed by the expected paralysis of business. In New York and Washington, D.C., similarly, the terrorists focused on key economic and political targets—but with incomparably greater success than Aum achieved.
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