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September 28, 2001 |
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Holt uncensored |
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, I kept thinking
of "Underground," Haruki Murakami's personal investigation
of the 1995 gassing of Tokyo's subway system by the religious
sect Aum Shinrikyo. Vintage released the paperback only a
few months ago (366 pages; $14).
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Murakami is the critically acclaimed novelist of such best-sellers
as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," "Norwegian
Wood," "A Wild Sheep Chase" and other works
of fiction. He might never have written about the gassings
except that "the Japanese media had bombarded us with
so many in-depth profiles of the Aum cult perpetrators,"
he felt, that the victims were "glimpsed only in passing"
and forgotten.
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"Our media probably wanted to create a collective image
of the 'innocent Japanese sufferer,' " Murakami writes,
"which is much easier to do when you don't have to deal
with real faces. Besides, the classic dichotomy of 'ugly (visible)
villains' versus the 'healthy (faceless) populace' makes for
a better story."
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So Murakami stopped his own work and attempted to locate,
out of the thousands of victims who died or were injured from
exposure to the bags of sarin (a toxic gas that is 26 times
as deadly as cyanide), those survivors who would be willing
to be interviewed for a nonfiction book.
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"I wanted to get away from any formula," he tells
us, "to recognize that each person on the subway that
morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and tears, contradictions
and dilemmas - and that all these factors had a place in the
drama."
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continue reading at |
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http://www.holtuncensored.com/members/column268.html |
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