Monday, January 23, 2006
Murakami's Underground.
Belle Waring posts some thoughts about Haruki Murakami's Underground, a work of non-fiction about the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway by members of a Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo. When I read most of Murakami's translated work last year, I usually posted about it, but I don't seem to have posted about Underground.
Waring notes: "The most striking thing to me was the long time that passed between when passengers exposed to sarin started to cough, notice a strange smell, experience burning eyes and dimming vision, and even vomit, and the time at which someone first spoke up to say, 'something is very wrong here, and we must get off the train.' ... Even when the subway workers announced that there had been a release of poison gas, there was no general panic, and many people seem to have been thinking much more about getting to work rather than feeling shock or worry about their personal safety."
Says Waring, this "really made me feel that I was reading about a culture very different from my own." For me, though, this brings back the morning of September 11, 2001, and the shock of non-recognition and realization. My actual memories of that morning are very different from what the day later came to signify. Obviously, it was different for those of us on the West Coast who heard the news early; I did not go to the office that day, and maybe that has something to do with why I recall calm instead of general panic. There is such a gulf, though, between what I remember and what I know think of when someone says "9/11" or "terrorist attack."
Waring notes: "The most striking thing to me was the long time that passed between when passengers exposed to sarin started to cough, notice a strange smell, experience burning eyes and dimming vision, and even vomit, and the time at which someone first spoke up to say, 'something is very wrong here, and we must get off the train.' ... Even when the subway workers announced that there had been a release of poison gas, there was no general panic, and many people seem to have been thinking much more about getting to work rather than feeling shock or worry about their personal safety."
Says Waring, this "really made me feel that I was reading about a culture very different from my own." For me, though, this brings back the morning of September 11, 2001, and the shock of non-recognition and realization. My actual memories of that morning are very different from what the day later came to signify. Obviously, it was different for those of us on the West Coast who heard the news early; I did not go to the office that day, and maybe that has something to do with why I recall calm instead of general panic. There is such a gulf, though, between what I remember and what I know think of when someone says "9/11" or "terrorist attack."
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