Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 07:54:15 +0100 (BST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?pierre=20guyotat?= <pierreguyotat-AT-yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [zizek-l] A Japanese Writer Analyzes Terrorists


TOKYO, Oct. 14 — For Haruki Murakami, Japan's most
popular living <BR>
fiction writer, the current struggle against terrorism
is no clash of <BR>
civilizations, much less a crusade.<BR>
<BR>
Rather, as the novelist sees it, the war that opposes
the United <BR>
States and its allies against reputed terrorist groups
like al Qaeda <BR>
is a collision between incompatible networks, or what
he calls <BR>
circuits, whose apprehension of reality is every bit
as <BR>
irreconcilable as matter and antimatter. And whose
collisions are <BR>
bound to be just as explosive.<BR>
<BR>
"The open circuit is this society," Mr.
Murakami said, "and the <BR>
closed circuit is the world of religious fanatics:
Islamic <BR>
fundamentalists or groups like Aum Shinrikyo. I think
they are all <BR>
the same in a way. Their worlds are perfect, because
they are closed <BR>
off."<BR>
<BR>
In the universe of the fanatic, he said: "If you
have questions, <BR>
there is always someone to provide the answers. In a
way, things are <BR>
very easy and clear, and you are happy as long as you
believe."<BR>
<BR>
In our open world, however, "things are very
incomplete," he said in <BR>
an interview in his tidy book-filled office, which
looks out over the <BR>
rooftops of Tokyo's fashionable Omotesando
neighborhood. He <BR>
continued: "There are many distractions and many
flaws. And instead <BR>
of being happy, in most cases we are frustrated and
stressed. But at <BR>
least things are open. You have choice and you can
decide the way you <BR>
live."<BR>
<BR>
Mr. Murakami's reflections recall discussions during
the cold war of <BR>
the relative advantages of open and closed societies,
as well as long-<BR>
running philosophical debates over the meaning of free
will. But his <BR>
views take on added interest because they come from a
non-Westerner, <BR>
one, moreover, whose society experienced a terrifying
chemical <BR>
weapons attack by the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect on
March 20, 1995.<BR>
<BR>
In novels like "Sputnik Sweetheart" and
"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," <BR>
the author has made something of a specialty of
dichotomies like <BR>
these. His quirky characters often seem to flit back
and forth <BR>
between two worlds, one humdrum and the other secret,
mysterious and <BR>
full of menace. But it is from a recent experiment
with nonfiction — <BR>
his first — that the author says he learned enough to
talk <BR>
confidently about the universe of terrorists and their
collisions <BR>
with our world.<BR>
<BR>
After the attack on Tokyo's subway system, which
killed 12 and <BR>
injured about 5,500, he spent a full year interviewing
the 62 victims <BR>
who consented to talk to him at length, producing
"Underground" <BR>
(Vintage International Edition, 2001), a Studs
Terkel-influenced work <BR>
that hauntingly chronicles their experiences on the
day of the attack <BR>
and in the months of slow and typically incomplete
recovery that <BR>
followed.<BR>
<BR>
Stung and surprised by subsequent criticism here that
he had <BR>
delivered a one-sided story, Mr. Murakami spent
another year <BR>
reporting a companion work, "The Place That Was
Promised," which <BR>
delves deeply into the work of Aum's devoted members.
"I am a <BR>
novelist, so people expected that I would be on the
Aum cult's side <BR>
because they are outsiders, and a novelist should be
sympathetic to <BR>
the outsiders," he said. "But I wrote
`Underground' because I was <BR>
interested in the victims, the ordinary people,
because I believe the <BR>
stories of the ordinary people are more important and
deeper than <BR>
those of the pure people, so to speak. And I believe I
did the right <BR>
thing.<BR>
<BR>
"A year later I wrote the Aum cult people's side.
Originally they <BR>
were two different books. Even now I can remember all
of the victims' <BR>
faces and voices, and yet I cannot remember those of
the Aum people."<BR>
<BR>
The victims' stories are full of everyday decisions
rendered <BR>
portentous by fate: spur-of-the-moment decisions to
take a different <BR>
train route than usual, or the annual meeting that put
the <BR>
unsuspecting individual in the path of a chemical
weapons attack.<BR>
<BR>
Others labored for months to make sense of what
happened to them, <BR>
like the man who said his reaction in the hospital bed
the next day <BR>
was: "Well, I'm O.K. I'd been right at the
epicenter, but instead of <BR>
shuddering at the death toll, I felt like I was
watching a program on <BR>
TV, as if it had been somebody else's problem. It was
only much later <BR>
that I began to wonder how I could have been so
callous. I ought to <BR>
have been furious, ready to explode. It wasn't until
the autumn that <BR>
it really sank in, little by little.<BR>
<BR>
"For example if someone had fallen down right in
front of me, I like <BR>
to think I'd have helped."<BR>
<BR>
It is also full of pathos. One man, whose sister was
reduced to a <BR>
vegetative state by the sarin gas, said: "The
night before the gas <BR>
attack, the family was saying over dinner: `My, how
lucky we are. All <BR>
together having a good time,' a modest share of
happiness. Destroyed <BR>
the very next day by those idiots. Those criminals
stole what little <BR>
joy we had."<BR>
<BR>
Compelling as these stories are, anyone seeking to
understand what <BR>
could drive people to acts of such wanton destruction
will find the <BR>
accounts of the Aum members even more illuminating,
all the more so <BR>
since the hijackers of the airplanes that smashed into
the World <BR>
Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11 disappeared
without leaving <BR>
behind any real testament.<BR>
<BR>
What first strikes a reader is the banality of the
evildoers. Aum's <BR>
members are ordinary people in almost every sense of
the word, from <BR>
dropouts with few prospects in search of some answers
in life to <BR>
highly educated professionals grown tired of the rat
race.<BR>
<BR>
In a chilling passage that rings with a kind of
weariness and disgust <BR>
with the world as well as faith in the cleansing
powers of suicidal <BR>
missions that one associates with religious fanatics
elsewhere, <BR>
Hiroyuki Kano, a computer expert who was 30 at the
time of the <BR>
attack, recounts his gradual seduction by Aum.<BR>
<BR>
"There was one other reality I came to ponder
when I was in the sixth <BR>
grade," said Mr. Kano, an Aum member who was not
involved in the <BR>
sarin attack. "I was staring at a pair of
scissors in my hand, and <BR>
the thought suddenly struck me that some adult had
worked very hard <BR>
to create them but that someday they would fall apart.
Same with <BR>
people. In the end they die. Everything's heading
straight for <BR>
destruction and there's no turning back. To put it
another way, <BR>
destruction itself is the principle by which the
universe operates."<BR>
<BR>
Once he joined Aum Shinrikyo, a cultish offshoot of
Buddhism that <BR>
promised a "fast path" to salvation, he
said, existence once again <BR>
began to have meaning. "Life in Aum was much
tougher than secular <BR>
life," Mr. Kano said. "But the tougher it
was, the more satisfying it <BR>
felt; my inner struggles were over, for which I was
grateful."<BR>
<BR>
Akio Namimura, another member, told Mr. Murakami,
"When I graduated <BR>
from high school I felt like I would either renounce
the world or <BR>
die, one of the two."<BR>
<BR>
He eventually joined Aum, paying whatever he could to
take part in <BR>
the group's training sessions. One course consisted of
taped sermons <BR>
by the group's founder, Master Shoko Asahara, a man
who, devotees <BR>
were told, was the "Final Liberated One."
The $3,000 fee bothered <BR>
him, but others told him, "That's a cheap price
to pay to get power."<BR>
<BR>
When Mr. Namimura raised questions about the group's
attacks, a <BR>
member explained: "Whether we are attacked or
whatever happens to us, <BR>
people who have a relationship with the master are
blessed. Even if <BR>
we fall into hell, he will save us later."<BR>
<BR>
Mr. Murakami said that hearing this kind of hermetic
logic, in which <BR>
any act or situation can be explained away, brought
him strangely <BR>
back to his own fiction.<BR>
<BR>
For all of the pivotal qualities of the events of 1995
in Japan, from <BR>
the Kobe earthquake to the sarin gas attack, Mr.
Murakami speaks with <BR>
deep regret about the way they were rendered banal, or
as he put <BR>
it, "consumed in a sea of media
coverage."<BR>
<BR>
This is where, as he sees it, the novelist's role in
society comes to <BR>
the fore, connecting huge public traumas to subtler
changes in life, <BR>
from the workaday experience of Japanese citizens down
to the fears <BR>
and dreams of his intensely imagined characters.<BR>
<BR>
"What I write are stories in which the hero is
looking for the right <BR>
way in this world of chaos," he said. "That
is my theme. At the same <BR>
time I think there is another world that is
underground. You can <BR>
access this inner world in your mind. Most
protagonists in my books <BR>
live in both worlds — this realistic world and the
underground world.<BR>
<BR>
"If you are trained you can find the passage and
come and go between <BR>
the two worlds. It is easy to find an entrance into
this closed <BR>
circuit, but it is not easy to find an exit. Many
gurus offer an <BR>
entry into the circuit for free. But they don't offer
a way out, <BR>
because they want to keep followers trapped. Those
people can be <BR>
soldiers when they are ordered to be. I think that is
very much like <BR>
what happened with those people who flew the planes
into those <BR>
buildings."<BR>
<BR>
The experiences of Japan, where few parallels are
being made between <BR>
the attack from within and the recent airliner
hijackings, and of the <BR>
United States are full of lessons for each other in an
era that Mr. <BR>
Murakami said might be called the "new world
chaos."<BR>
<BR>
"In Japan most people think that terrorism is the
United States' own <BR>
problem," Mr. Murakami said. "The U.S. is
the strongest country in <BR>
the world and Islamic people don't like America,
therefore there is a <BR>
terrorism problem.<BR>
<BR>
"But that isn't right. The same thing can happen
at any moment, in <BR>
Tokyo, Berlin or Paris, because this is war between
closed and open <BR>
circuits, different states of minds. This is not about
nations or <BR>
countries, and not about religion, but about states of
mind."<BR>
<BR>
For the United States, he said, the message was that
countries' <BR>
trajectories can be profoundly altered by events like
these, often in <BR>
ways impossible to predict. "I was born in 1949,
and when I was a <BR>
teenager this country was getting richer and richer,
and we all <BR>
believed we could be happy if we were rich," he
said. "But that <BR>
wasn't the case, and this was a real turning
point."<BR>
<BR>
"The New York tragedy announces a different phase
for American <BR>
society," Mr. Murakami said. "This is the
first attack on the <BR>
American mainland, and people know they are
vulnerable. Things are <BR>
not the same anymore.<BR>
<BR>
"I don't know, honestly, if things will get
better or worse, but I <BR>
wish for the best. We have to be mature and get used
to the new <BR>
chaos. We have to be patient with that chaos. There is
no simple or <BR>
clear solution for it. One of the most important
things is sympathy <BR>
and respect. In the war between our network and their
network these <BR>
can go a long way."<BR>
 

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