Underground- Haruki Murakami
By: Hannah Johnson
It had been a typical morning in Tokyo. It was a Monday, March 20, 1995, spring just beginning to blossom, as commuters boarded the city’s subway cars. Then, holes were poked into bags of sarin gas, sarin twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. The subway was under attack by members of the religious cult, Aum Shinrikyo. This day has become known infamously for the fatal gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, captures this tragedy through his journalistic book Underground.
Underground contains several first-person accounts, with interviews from some of the people on the subway that day. They woke up that morning and went through the motions of their life, and boarded the subway car, a standard and maybe trivial account on any other day. Though there are multiple first-person accounts, and technical details start to repeat, it never gets redundant or boring. The reader can see a true story not through a surface-level display of information, but through numerous real accounts and numerous pairs of eyes that each experienced this tragedy differently. No two people tell the exact same story of a tragedy, and how it impacts them and their loved ones. Interviewees report the confusion and the chaos, their own physical feelings as the sarin gas started to poison them, the injured, the dead.
Part of what Murakami highlights so well in Underground is how much of life falls on chance, and how that adds to the value of life. A tragedy, one no one could see coming, could happen at any moment. It is frightening, heartbreaking, a reason to hold loved ones tighter. First-person accounts walk readers through their lives that morning. Perhaps this is the morning, for one reason or another, someone is out of bed and out the door earlier than normal. Had they left later, they would’ve never experienced the attack. Pure chance is the line between life and death, between intense medical trauma and getting off physically unharmed, maybe only hearing about it later, at a safe distance. Anyone can walk into the wrong room at the wrong time, and there’s a sense of powerlessness in our universe paired with the ability to endlessly persevere and live in the face of despair.
Later, Murakami provides first-hand accounts from those involved with the Aum cult. This very interesting shift takes readers from the perspective of an everyday commuter, to getting a glimpse into the incredibly complex mechanisms of a cult, how things like this happen, and the inner workings leading up to such a tragedy. Cults will always be an intense and convoluted part of society and human psychology, and Murakami, through those who experienced it, is able to walk readers through dark, scary, unseen corners of humanity, again, going deeper into this tragedy, instead of making non-fiction a shallow dump of impersonal information, but a mix of human narratives, all the pain included.
“The leader they revered turned out to be nothing more than a false prophet, and they understand now how they were manipulated by his insane desires.”
Murakami is able to brilliantly write non-fiction for everyone, including fiction readers. Those who may never pick up non-fiction, maybe finding it boring, can be pulled into the story and all its humanness- real, raw human voices, experiences and emotion. Underground is a devastating story, but it’s one worth telling, for the power of humanity, and for the value of life.
