August (Actual) Bonus Review: Underground
A terrorist attack, a country's psyche, and text that speaks to 2020
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
On March 20, 1995 members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin into the Tokyo subway system. “In an attempt to discover why,” says the back of Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, “Murakami talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe. …As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.”
The story
Underground is, in the main, an oral history of the attack as recounted by the people who lived through it, and while I am a huge fan of the medium, it took me nearly a hundred pages really to connect with the book, for a handful of reasons. The first is…well, it’s right in the subtitle. In college, I took REL 322: Japanese Buddhism, and our professor — straight out of central casting with a slept-on fishtail braid and “clever” necklaces — explained to us in the first seminar that those of us raised in the West could only come so far in a felt understanding of belief systems particular to Japan. She also had a couple of tart comments about Westerners purposefully conflating “zen” and “stoned,” if I recall correctly, but I’ve come back to that announcement periodically over the years, the idea that I could get my arms around Japanese cultural concepts intellectually, but truly getting it wasn’t in reach — and I thought of it again here, reading these as-told-to accounts that had a certain capable sameness from one to another.
That’s the second reason: an American oral history, like that legendary SNL book or one of the Plimpton-Stein projects, lets you hear the individuals a little more. There are moments in the RFK funeral-train book where you can nearly hear, under an account of feeling hungry outside Baltimore, the faint rustle of a gabardined shoulder lifting into a Gallic shrug; people who, like my grandma used to, say “look at television” instead of “watch TV” are allowed to say “look at television,” and the reader is thereby allowed to distinguish in the mind’s ear among the “speakers.” The accounts in Underground are more uniform, and perhaps this is itself a Post-It flag pointing to both the subtitle’s Japanese psyche, and the aspects of it that remain out of reach of my ’murrican mind: less of a preoccupation with individuality, less of a willingness to go on or become part of the record. The stories are unique, but there is a conformity of tone, a patient and resigned rue with the occasional wry twinkle. Could be the translation, too, for all I know — and it’s not a bad thing. In fact, it put me in mind of translations of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry, the way Milosz’s dreamy subjects were told with such matter-of-factness. Here, the dreaminess is a nightmare, but the willing of it to dry ground is similar.
The third reason, of course, is reading it at the turn of September, in the back half of a year whose savageries have made 9/11 seem nearly quaint. The weather was nearly identical to 9/11’s on the morning earlier this week when I got to the Underground chapter on “Shizuko Akashi,” a pseudonymous victim of the attacks and Murakami’s “sixtieth interviewee — though unlike all the others, she can’t speak her own mind.” Shizuko and her brother “Tatsuo” both participated in Underground, Tatsuo facilitating/translating for Shizuko, who was profoundly affected physically and cognitively by the sarin; this section is more traditionally “reported” than most of the other chapters, and this is where the book and I met at last:
Soft, cushioning, girlish fingers, yet far stronger than I had anticipated. Soon they clamp tight over my hand in the way that a child sent on an errand grips that “important item” she’s not supposed to lose. There’s a strong will at work here, clearly seeking some objective. Focused, but very likely not on me; she’s after some “other” beyond me. Yet that “other” goes on a long journey and seems to find its way back to me. … [S]omething exists unharmed and intact within the walls of her inner space. When she holds someone’s hand, it’s all she can do to communicate that “this thing is here.” (101)
The haunting detail of that — not only that I found it haunting, but that Murakami is describing the experience of being haunted by the essence of a woman who came close to death, but survived. Later in the chapter, he mentions thinking throughout the creation of the book about “the Big Question: what does it mean to be alive?”, but doesn’t get too bogged down in relating his own ambivalent answers to Shizuko’s circumstances, going back to a Disneyland reference to close Shizuko’s part of the story.
I recommend the book overall, but mostly, I recommend reading Shizuko’s chapter; it’s not necessarily representative, but 1) if you came for Murakami’s writing/way of thinking out loud, this is where you’ll find it; 2) there is a weary beauty that anyone who is just trying to get to 366 sunsets in a row in this disorienting year that wants us all dead, or failing that in tears even in our dreams, will recognize. And may recognize as…what it means to be alive. To keep on, to keep trying to be understood, to understand others half a world away, to understand that there are things we’ll never understand.
If ever she gets well enough to speak unhindered, that’s something I’d want to ask: “That day I came to visit, what did you see?”
A great writer and attentive chronicler assigning faces to history, one hopes. — SDB
Thanks again for supporting Best Evidence, and for picking out such great material for me each month. I’d love to hear from readers who’ve also read Underground, so please tell me your thoughts!