Haruki Murakami
In the early morning of May 20, 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo, a now-forbidden religious cult, released sarin gas on three Tokyo subway trains. However, the deadly nerve gas, conceived in Nazi laboratories in the 1930s, failed to cause the destruction the perpetrators had intended. Yet, the families of the 12 people who died and the thousands of injured – a good part of whom had to deal with varying long-term aftereffects – would disagree with this assessment.
In the course of 1996 when the worse shock over the attack had passed, but memories were still fairly fresh, Haruki Murakami interviewed 62 survivors. Of these testimonies, 34 are contained in “Underground”, a shocking account of how a normal Monday commute turned into a nightmare for many, touching on emotions that were still raw a year or more after the attack.
This edition of “Underground” also contains a part 2, titled “The Place that was Promised”, a collection of 8 interviews with (former) members of Aum Shinrikyo. While most of the victims expressed a hatred toward Aum, these interviewees were torn in their views. Most of them initially joined the group because they felt alienated by the world around them or tried to fill a (spiritual) void in their lives.
Even though they had a spiritual home in and were completely devoted to Aum, they declared that had they been asked to carry out the attack, they would have declined. Only one said that he would have gone through with it “if I had been asked by the right person.”
This raises the question – and Murakami addresses it in his own reflections on the topic – how far each of us would be willing to go for “the right person” or “the right cause”. On average, as history shows: all the way down to the inner circles of hell.
Haruki Murakami (born in Kyoto, 1949) is a Japanese author. He is most famous for his novels, which have been translated into dozens of languages and received numerous (international) prizes. He also writes essays and non fiction like this book.
For a first-hand account into one of Japan’s deadliest terrorist attacks in peace time. I recommend this particular edition for a view of both sides; they are equally chilling but for different reasons. It’s available on amazon.