Underground (Murakami Haruki)

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
by Murakami Haruki, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel

I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama.

The drama took place on March 20, 1995. Five men, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, released sarin poison gas inside the trains of the Tokyo subway, killed a dozen people, and injured hundreds. Nine months after the incident, the novelist Haruki Murakami began to interview the victims in order to understand what actually happened.

Underground followed the template of Murakami's fiction: the story of ordinary men and women thrust in an abnormal situation. But it was a real nightmare happening to real people in the real world, unfolding as if in real time. He did what Gabriel García Márquez did in Clandestine in Chile—compress hours of interviews into a compelling narrative.

The narrative has two self-contained parts, divided into short sections focusing on one person and his part in the gas attack. The first part, titled "Underground", was translated by Alfred Birnbaum. It recounted the event from the victims' point of view. To balance the story the second part, "The Place That Was Promised", translated by Philip Gabriel, told of the stories of members and ex-members of the Aum cult. The first part was already a brilliant exploration of the outcome of terrorism; the second part was a glimpse into the minds of individuals who renounced the world and joined the religious cult.

In the first part, the victims and their relatives narrated the story one by one. They shared their personal backgrounds, where they came from and where they were born, their current occupation, the daily itinerary of their train rides, and what happened to them in the subway on the day they were exposed to sarin gas. For most of the victims, the attack had taken a permanent toll on their health. It had adversely affected their physical and mental constitutions. Many are still burdened by the aftereffects of sarin months after inhaling it.

The individual stories fitted well into Murakami's adopted journalistic framework to convey a macroscopic view of the nightmare. The story of the attack may have been predetermined; the outcome was all over the news. But here it was told naturally, without sensationalism, and yet several moments in the book would give one the scare. While some of Murakami's fiction was permeated with elements of science fiction and magic, the true story here stuck to the "truth". Ultimately, the truth was no less unbelievable or surreal, just like any surreal event in life.

The acknowledged influences in the composition of Underground were Studs Terkel and Bob Greene, but the form and structure itself was reminiscent of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's story "In a Grove". Several witnesses were asked in a kind of deposition to recount what happened on that day. The accumulation of the stories portrayed a kind of hell, a nightmare experienced in broad daylight, underground.

(Murakami was too entrenched in his subject to completely efface himself from the narrative. His strong opinions were shared in the prefaces to the two parts, in the brief introductory sections preceding each interviewee's account, and in his summary essays at the end of the two parts. In contrast to the oblique way with which he confronted the catastrophe of the Kobe earthquake in after the quake, this work of nonfiction tackled upfront the cruelty inflicted on an unsuspecting public.)


LEFT IMAGE: NORMAL LEFT EYE OF A RABBIT; RIGHT IMAGE: CONTRACTION OF THE PUPIL, 5 MINUTES AFTER THE INSTILLATION OF 5 µg/kg OF SARIN (Vijayaraghavan et al. 2007)


Just how deadly was sarin gas? Classified as a weapon of mass destruction and banned by the United Nations in 1993, a tiny drop of it could kill a person on the spot. Depending on the amount of exposure, sarin can lead to contraction of the eye pupils, convulsions, coma, difficulty in breathing, disturbed sleep and nightmares, extreme sensitivity to light, foaming at the mouth, high fevers, loss of consciousness, loss of memory, nausea and vomiting, paralysis, post-traumatic stress disorder, respiratory ailments, seizures, uncontrollable trembling, vision problems (temporary or permanent), and death.

(One victim suggested that increasing materialism was partly to blame as catalyst to this attack. Capitalism as a precondition to insensitivity, the loss of moral compass, leading to complacency, selfishness, and cruelty. This critique was not really too pronounced in the book although one can frame this latent argument from the way the narrative repeatedly presented the attack as an interruption of the subway passengers' travel to their work. Something of a Marxist idea about this interruption of the mode of production was similar to the way countless crimes against women in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 can be seen as an indictment of the maquiladora economy in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.)

In the first part, Murakami questioned 35 individuals and elicited from them a sense of what it felt like to be in the middle of a tragedy. It was obvious that he had copious amounts of sympathy for the victims. In interview after interview, he introduced a new face, a new victim, someone with not just a unique injury but a new perspective on what transpired on that day. The victims were telling and re-telling the terrorist act for the reader, over and over.

   ... I walked up the stairs to the ticket barrier and went above ground. Suddenly I met with the most amazing sight. People were dropping like flies all over the place.
   I'd taken the third car from the back and had absolutely no idea what was happening at the front of the platform. I was just heading up above ground, swearing under my breath like everyone else, when right before my eyes I saw three people fall down and foam at the mouth, their arms and legs twitching. "What the hell's going on here?" I thought.
   Closest to me was this man whose limbs were quivering, he was trembling all over and foaming at the mouth, having some kind of seizure. I just looked at him and my jaw dropped. I knew it was serious and rushed over to ask him what had happened. I could see he needed immediate care. That's when someone who was still walking by said, "Him foaming like that is dangerous, you'd better stuff some newspaper in his mouth." So we both helped him. After that all these exhausted people kept coming up from the ticket barrier below, then dropping to the ground. I couldn't work out what had happened. Some of the people sitting down suddenly just keeled over flat out.

What would be the point of replaying for the reader the above scene in different ways, repeatedly drilling the same thing in his mind? All these individual stories, what do they say? Do they add up to something coherent, something that can be grasped?

One was struck by a variety of responses to the attack: anguish, complacency, bitterness, fear, trauma. Seen from many angles, the gas attack approached a certain magnitude of reality for the reader, just as it must have had for the novelist who personally talked and listened to the victims, shaping and re-shaping the narrative in his mind.

In the act of reading, the packets of sarin were being punctured dozens of times, the deadly liquid spreading on the floor, releasing the potent smell and downing passenger after passenger. But in the end it did not feel gratuitous or redundant to me. The stories were reliving the individual responses, reactions, and sufferings; yet collectively they were pointing to something more troubling, more arresting. We were not learning something from one tragedy, one nightmare, or one moment of hell. We were reading about many disasters, many parallel nightmares, many hells that materialized simultaneously.

"Overwhelming violence" is Murakami's description of catastrophes in Japan, which included the 1995 Kobe earthquake and may as well include the recent March earthquake and the resulting tsunami and the nuclear accidents. Hate and violence and natural calamities are being staged in an uncertain world. It is a world where one moment you're walking and standing free, and the next moment you are tipping over the train platform, the world turning upside down, literally darkening in front of you.

The blow was very hard but that doesn't mean one ought to give up. What the survivors can do is describe what memory can still describe. And what the writer can do is seek out the witnesses, listen to their stories, and set on paper testimonials of suffering. Murakami accomplished what he set out to do: describe a person's life, family, hopes and fears, contradictions, and dilemmas. In addition, "Underground" was a catalogue of crimes.

What impelled the novelist to write about the gas attack was his desire to know how this kind of event could happen in Tokyo, one of the safest cities in the world. A terrorist act by a religious group, undertaken in the name of salvation, flew in the face of everything we hold sacred. Logic and common sense broke down. In the transcribed interviews in Underground, belated words after the brutal fact, Murakami allowed the victims to assert their humanities in a dangerous world. He wrote a memorial for human fortitude, a manifesto against irrationality.





(Posted in early form in Project Dogeared; Chemical structure of sarin nerve gas from Wikipedia; Images of rabbit's eye from J Med CBR Def.)

South of the Border, West of the Sun (Murakami Haruki)

The story, a love story, is simple. A boy fell in love with a girl. Many years later, when the man was already married, they met again.

I usually hate Haruki Murakami's fiction. The flatness of his characters, the cheesy self-help quotes, the repetitions of these cheesy self-help quotes, the poor execution of surrealism. These are some of my gripes about his works, particularly in most short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, all the stories in after the quake, and in Kafka on the Shore. The latter novel is simply an ambitious mess of puzzle fragments whose seams show at the edges. So I'm a bit surprised with the depth of characterization in South of the Border, West of the Sun. Murakami's mannerisms were still present but they were tempered by the voice of its narrator. The things that don't work well with the other books found their way here in concentrated form but somehow this book resisted the tendency to be mediocre. Perhaps it was because of the straight diction of the book, which can be detected in translator Philip Gabriel's careful words. For some reason, I liked this book as much as I liked Norwegian Wood. The simple writing style evoked authentic feelings of pain and loss. The characters were ordinary (ordinary guy, ordinary person) as the characters themselves are wont to describe themselves, here as well as in Norwegian Wood. Their very ordinariness questioning the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in, the unusual relationships forged and broken. The narrator's emotional journey progressed through a fair amount of self-examination, an all too honest self-examination that was despairing and yet never totally depressing, never completely succumbing to the blows of life and hate, to the vision of the abyss. The main characters foundered and were lost. But a touch of hope lingered at the end, a generous glimpse of the miracle of existence. The ordinary characters were trying to be brave for the coming of "a brand-new day", here in this novel and in others.

This love story had certain moments of darkness, certain ominous moments. Yet in certain places, it had lightness and buoyancy, the fleeting clarity of an insight. Perhaps an inner truth, perhaps what goes on in the heart.

It's a good story. As clear and transparent as good wine.




(Image)

Ōe, Murakami, and self-censorship

"… No War and Peace, no Kenzaburo Oe’s Homo Sexualis, no Catcher in the Rye. That’s your Kobayashi Book Shop. I mean, who in their right mind’s going [to] be envious of that? Would you be?"

– Norwegian Wood, Murakami Haruki (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)

For the month of May, the Flips Flipping Pages Shelfari group goes for a reading of art-themed books. I've read Two Novels: J ; Seventeen by Ōe Kenzaburo, translated by Luk Van Haute. The painting referred to in J is "The Inferno" by the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux. Seven characters go to a vacation house to make a film based on this painting. Unfortunately, I can’t find a painting of that title online. It's described in the book as “a reproduction of a work by the surrealist Delvaux, in which several women with lovely pubic hair and an air of abstraction are walking through an eternally quiet landscape in the style of de Chirico.... Their pubic hair was an incomparably beautiful chestnut brown, like a shade of bronze.” To be sure, several paintings by Delvaux feature several nude women walking in an urban landscape. It’s just that no one of them is called “The Inferno” or “Hell,” for that matter.

Anyway, both novels (novellas, really) are great reads, but only J is art-related. According to the introduction to the book by Masao Miyoshi, the original Japanese title of J is “nearly untranslatable” though it can be roughly approximated as Sexual Humans. Well, I find that to be a better and more apt title than J. (It must have been what Alfred Birnbaum, in the above epigraph, was referring to as Homo Sexualis. Curiously the second translation of Norwegian Wood, by Jay Rubin, did not mention a title for Ōe’s book in the same quoted passage.)

“J” is the name of the main protagonist, the husband of the film director who was to shoot her art film. With a limited number of characters (J, his wife-director, his sister, the cameraman, the actor, the poet-screenwriter, and the jazz singer/actress), all of them confined in one setting, complete with alcohol and promiscuity and sexual issues, it’s a staging of Murphy’s Law. What happened in the set, even before filming began, are a combination of decadence, trysts, betrayals, and a hair-raising cultural clash with some conservative people living in the neighborhood.

One can read a sort of edginess and sexual rebelliousness in both novels. In the second part of J, sexual promiscuity takes on a new form. It’s now the realm of chikan (which the translator explained in a footnote to literally mean "an oversexed idiot, used to refer to subway molesters"). There’s a band of chikans, sexual predators plying on trains to molest women. The surprising thing is that Ōe managed to somehow humanize his characters. For all their perversity and immorality, there was an underlying complexity in the depiction of the sexual perverts’ irrational behavior, which did not excuse them, but however made them all too human. "Sexual humans," in fact.

The second novella, Seventeen, is a psychological and political novel, but more political really. It was so controversial in Japan that Ōe suppressed the appearance of its sequel in any translation. In it, Ōe managed to delineate the complex character of a troubled teenager prone to sexual-existential angst. Essentially the book cannot be removed from the political as it was based on true events of a 17-year old who flirted with an extreme right-wing group, stabbed a leftist leader to death, and later hanged himself in jail. The latter two events were the plot of “A Political Youth Dies,” the sequel to Seventeen. ( I don’t think I’m spoiling the story as the sequel is censored anyway.) The actual assassination which happened in 1960 was caught on video. It captured the imagination of the nation and served as a reminder of how extreme the politics of the right can be – the youth was labeled a terrorist.

Ōe certainly had an interesting take on the interplay of sex/politics and private/public life. The two novels deal with sexual perverts and how they become entangled with politics of the day. Somehow, they still maintain their shock value in terms of graphic descriptions. It’s hard to imagine how they were received by the Japanese when they were first published in the 1960s. They were said to cause a sensation.

I'm hoping that Ōe will allow the publication of "A Political Youth Dies", the sequel to Seventeen, which he apparently suppressed because it angered extreme right-wingers and he was uncertain about the style and content of the book. He was like Murakami Haruki in the self-censorship aspect, but they have different motivations for censoring their own works. Murakami's motivation was aesthetic (he thinks his two early novels were juvenile works) while Ōe's were aesthetic and political (right-wingers threw stones at his house and harassed him with death threats, leftists constantly sent him letters accusing him of betrayal and cowardice when he withdrew publication of his books). These writers are being too harsh on themselves.

I’m actually sympathetic to Ōe's case. He will not please both sides, the right or the left, and his decision to suppress the translation to any language of the sequel to his novel was as much based on his uncertainty of his work as on his and his family's personal security. I think that despite the literary merit of his politically charged novel, his decision to censor it based on personal security may be valid, although some readers, like me, feel deprived of the continuity of the story. In that sense, even if the novels are of high literary value, it failed the imagination of its "immediate" readers who saw in it a distortion of their political beliefs.

The ideal case is for a political novel to be judged by readers based on literary and artistic filters. As to whether it contains non-progressive politics or not … but who is to know if it contains one or the other? I say let the reader be the judge. Whether the reader wants to subscribe to a critical reading of the book’s politics, is up to him. But how readers in the immediate society of the writer (the Japanese in 1960s Japan, in Ōe's case) will react to overtly political themed novels is another matter. This may be the quandary of a writer born in a milieu hostile to political and sexual expressions.

On the surface of it, several factors seem to weigh down Ōe’s books. First, he based his story on a true story of a troubled teenager and his assassination of a leftist leader. Second, the assassination was captured on tape, shown on national television, and thus entered the national consciousness and left a stain on the doctrines and methods of extreme rightists. Third, Ōe’s imagining of the teenage assassin as a disturbed masturbator did not meet the approval of some readers. The protests came from the sexualization of the character of the assassin in Seventeen and, perhaps, in its sequel. I believe that in the first part of the story (Seventeen), Ōe has sensitively imagined the character as a troubled teenager and has given an authentic, albeit sexually-oriented, edge to his inner conflicts. True, the story exhibited the usual trappings of a young, impressionable teenager, and Ōe’s interpretation of the turbulence of the political climate of the times (1960s Japan) was made at the expense of a polite, conventional, or moderate fictional representation. The shock value was disagreeable to some but, in his own way, he just told it how it was.

It is partly the shock value itself that Ōe seemed to regret later, as he wrote something of an apology for his "careless way of writing," blaming himself that he "should have handled Seventeen and A Political Youth Dies with greater skill," that he "could have written without provoking the right wing and yet making [his] message more forthright." But again, I think Ōe was being too harsh on himself.

On the other hand, Murakami suppressed the publication outside Japan of his first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, as well as the first English translation of Norwegian Wood, all books translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Murakami has mentioned in interviews that his estimation of the first two books is not so high, thus he wanted to limit their distribution. Which is a puzzling decision since international sellers (eBay, Amazon) can still get hold of them and retail them outside, albeit sometimes at steep prices. Typed versions of Pinball, 1973 even appeared on the web and access to the books are not entirely prohibitive. Since the first two books are part of a trilogy (or tetralogy if Dance Dance Dance, which also shared characters with these books, is included), there is really something to be gained by reading them prior to A Wild Sheep Chase, the third novel. The books provide some back stories on the main characters, and tell of their early friendships and relationships which can have a bearing on appreciation of the third book. These books are indeed less mature works; it shows. They are self-conscious novels, though moments of beauty, tenderness, and surrealism sometimes flicker in them that make them worthwhile reads.

What drives a certain writer to suppress his early works? When the first novels were usually written at such a precocious age, the writer was unsure of his technique. The trajectory of his career depends in part on the first impressions he makes even if the latter books prove to be the more enduring and the ones that actually spell his success.

The case of Ōe Kenzaburo and his trilogy of novels about sexual deviants in the early 1960s demonstrate a "careless way of writing" that is not up to the moral/ethical/political/whatever scruples of his immediate reading audience. It demonstrates further that the reflection of political reality in books, or the entanglement of characters with the politics of the day, can endanger the life of a writer to the extent that he will censor his own works. As pointed out to me by a member from LibraryThing reading site, Ōe has had his share of crossing the right-wing scholars and politicians in issues related to Japanese involvement in wartime mass suicides.

The case of Murakami Haruki is a more puzzling one. Partly I think it revolves around the "fame complex" that a writer catapulted to popularity falls prey to. Vanity? It may not be as simple as that. It may be something related to the legacy a writer wants to leave. But I don't want to speculate or dwell too much on Murakami. I just think his self-censorship is not justified at all, even if his assessment of his own books tell otherwise.

Going back to Ōe: We want a writer’s politics not to be indebted to any alternative (centrist) perspective other than his own. To avoid offending the right or the left is never an option. It is not a question of whether they ought to be consistent in their leftist/rightist ideas or they should stick to being harmless and just depict human nature in neutral tones. I prefer if they stick to risqué positions. Their works become interesting even if one doesn’t share their politics, e.g., José Saramago and his outdated ideology. (Saramago, I think, is another novelist who doesn’t want to publish his early novels). There is an ethical dimension to novels of politics that should bolster the right of writers to expression and publication.

It would have been better if these writers allow readers to judge for themselves the value of their works, whether the claims that these novels are inferior or they promote some kind of non-progressive/destructive/irresponsible/whatever politics are warranted and so must really be disowned. But then we will never know.

So to reiterate: Mr Ōe, I'm hoping that when the political climate finally permits (which hopefully is not as near as never), you will allow the publication of A Political Youth Dies in translation. You owe it to readers who want to know how the story ended the way you tell it and to see for their own eyes the uncertainties you attribute to it.

Pinball, 1973 bounces back

This morning when I checked my LibraryThing account, I was surprised to learn in a group discussion on Murakami Haruki's books that Pinball, 1973, Murakami’s most sought-after second novel published in 1980 (and the first to be published in English translation by Alfred Birnbaum in 1985), is finally available again. My surprise is partly due to the fact that I am already two-thirds into finishing this book, which is the second volume of The Trilogy of the Rat. I’m reading the widely available pdf in the web which I downloaded last year. Because Murakami considers his first two works of fiction as minor novels, he restricted the publication of these two books. He only authorized their publication in Japan. Back in 2007, the weblog The Millions linked to a pdf copy of Pinball for the benefit of Murakami fans.

The pdf languished on my TBR and I only got to start reading it a few days ago as part of my “Murakami Q Reading Challenge” which requires me to read the first nine (9) books of Murakami in English in the chronological order of their Japanese publication. (More on this challenge later). I’ve read Murakami’s first book Hear the Wind Sing before Christmas holidays, and so I’m onto Pinball now. Part of my reading plan this year includes a couple of Jap-fic which I started collecting less than a year ago.

The binding of the new edition of Pinball is once again the same format used by Kodansha English Library series – a pocket-sized paperback with the same cover art as the original that came out in ’85. The official release date is Christmas Day 2009. The reprints are currently available in Amazon Japan and ebay.com. (It's the 12th printing edition and hopefully the print run was large enough to accommodate the surge in demand.)

The book retails for about ¥819 at amazon.co.jp (shipping not yet included). It's just under $9.00 (around Php400). Outside Japan the shipping cost is expected to be high, but it beats the amazon.com price hands down. A copy of the early edition (1985 or so) at Amazon US is sold at a very prohibitive price of more than $500.

A cursory search of the web led me to two early blog announcements of the new printing. A comment in the second blog (Jan. 11) is particularly interesting as it noted that the price of the book in ebay has drastically decreased. The book can be had at around $20 in ebay. The latest reprinting brings the price of Pinball from a whopping 3 to 4-figure price (dollars) to a two-figure price.

True enough, “supply and demand” is in effect. Though the current Amazon US prices are still pegged at higher figures, we expect the influx of new editions to somehow lower them (even if they are collectible early copies). Through international sellers, the book can now reach a wider readership outside Japan.

How I wish publishers would do the same to more deserving out-of-print works which are long overdue in the presses. Case in point: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.