Memories of the 1995 attack, rumours of disappearances

Last week, seven members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult were executed in Japan for, among other things, their role in a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo underground on March 20, 1995. That attack, in which 13 persons died, became the subject of writer Haruki Murakami’s non-fiction study, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Soon after the attack by the doomsday cult, writes Murakami in the preface, he saw a letter in a magazine from a woman whose husband resigned from his job after failing to fall back into his work routine. The trigger to quit was not the injury in the attack or the incomplete recovery. It was his co-workers’ “snide remarks” at his condition. Murakami kept thinking about this “secondary victimisation”, of a man being compelled to leave his job after the violence of the chemical attack.

Writes Murakami: “Whatever the reason, his colleagues had singled out this young salaryman — ‘Hey, here’s the guy from that weird attack — it couldn't have made any sense to him… I grew curious to learn more about the woman who wrote in about her husband. I wanted to probe deeper into how Japanese society could perpetrate such a double violence. Soon after that I decided to interview the survivors of the attack.”

The interviews reveal the different ways in which individuals respond to, variously, the trauma of the day, loss, incapacity. Together the interviews yield a pixellated picture of the human psyche, and even two decades after the event make for a very disturbing, yet illuminating read. As for himself, Murakami writes about how these interviews were also a way for him to “understand Japan at a deeper level” after living abroad for years.

We all know Murakami better now given the many novels that came after Underground, but even then he confessed: “Another personal motive for my interest in the Tokyo gas attack is that it took place underground. Subterranean worlds… have always fascinated me and are an important motif in my novels.”

The mysteries of the Tokyo underground are also highlighted in a recent travel book, Beyond the Map: Unruly Enclaves, Ghostly Places, Emerging Lands and Our Search for New Utopias, by Alastair Bonnett. Among the places he maps is Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku train station, with many levels, 36 platforms, 200 exits, and any number of stories (hearsay) about commuters who got lost in its staircases and never made it back out.