4

Murakami Haruki as Literary Journalist

Why was it not enough that these unfortunates had had to suffer the injury of the sarin incident itself? Why should they have had to suffer twice, victim also of the violence of the ordinary society that surrounds us all?

—Murakami Haruki, Andāguraundo

To this point we have explored, through the metaphysical Murakami landscape, how language as narrative constitutes and shapes not only the realities external to the subject but those that lurk within the mind, in dreams and the imagination, even in the realm of the gods themselves. It is time, then, to bring the discussion back down to terra firma and, returning to our opening theme of constructed realities, test some of our hypotheses on those texts in the Murakami repertoire that touch upon current events. The purpose of this discussion is twofold: first, to examine Murakami’s experiments with hybrid modes of writing that combine the literary tropes of fiction with current events reportage; and second, to explore how use of these hybrid modes leads to a confrontation between the individual inner narrative and the various collective external narratives that seek to supplant it. The hybrid modes to which I refer are literary journalism, for which there is a growing body of theoretical writing, and what I will term journalistic fiction, a genre of writing that I believe exists but has yet to be noticed until now. In the next few pages I will describe both modes of writing and some of the representational issues that will attend them, because while literary journalism is not so far “out in left field” as it was, say, twenty years ago, in the field of Japanese literature it remains virtually unknown, despite the fact that creative nonfiction—literary journalism, reportage (from the French; ruporutāju in Japanese, usually shortened to rupo), and fiction grounded in current events—makes up a remarkable percentage of what is published in Japan each year, as a visit to a Japanese bookstore or public library will clearly demonstrate.

What makes these genres both interesting and relevant to the current study is the tension that is created between the subjective and the objective when terms like literary and journalism—in practice understood to be mutually exclusive—are brought into proximity to one another. This, however, is a fallacy, for “objective fact” itself is a fallacy, and our ability to represent it remains illusory, not because we lack the will or integrity to seek out “the truth,” but because working with the endlessly subjective, culturally bound tool of language to apprehend and express any given event or phenomenon, we are compelled to express individual truths rather than any single definitive one.

This should by no means discourage us, however, from seeking out truths, in plural, and the more the better. The mistake we make lies not in seeking facts but in imagining that we have got them definitively and are capable of sharing them, unabridged and in mirrorlike representation, with others. This is the part that proves more than we can manage owing to the clumsy nature of the linguistic tools we use.

Having posited the constitutive function of language in chapter 1 of this volume, let us now return to the scene of the crime and learn what good, if any, can be had from it. I propose that some of Murakami’s nonfiction and certain works of his fiction contain discernible elements of recent or current events, and that these might be fruitfully reexamined now in terms of how they present the author’s subjective apprehension of those events, with the result of recovering, to some extent, a sense of humanity—of actuality—for the participants thereof, while also providing a foil, as it were, to popular conceptions of these events that have been fed by a largely homogenous mass media system in Japan. Returning yet again to the Jerusalem speech, the “wall” is now the Japanese mass media, while the “egg” is the individual witness of events. Naturally, this includes Murakami himself.

Prior to entering this discussion in earnest, however, it is useful to rehearse—and where necessary, to adjust—current Western theories of literary journalism,1 as well as to construct a clearer framework regarding what I am calling journalistic fiction, that is, fiction that has been grounded in current (or nearly current) events. Our first step is to establish a matrix that takes into account two principal issues: fidelity or infidelity to actual events (the “factuality” continuum), and subjective or objective narrative style (the “literary” continuum). The first of these places at one extreme a high level of fidelity to actual events, and at the other extreme, a high level of embellishment or liberty taken with those events. The former may be termed “nearly factual,” the latter “nearly fictional.” The second continuum places at one extreme a highly subjective, literary written style that places emphasis on not only what is said but how artistically or innovatively it is expressed; at the other extreme is the detached, unambiguous, and undecorated prose of the expository essay or conventional news story. The former is termed “literary,” and the latter (for want of a better term) “expository.”

I do not mean to imply that the study of writing and genre is something that can be accomplished with charts and a slide rule, of course, but matrices like these, when grounded not in evaluative but in descriptive terms, have been used effectively to identify more clearly other genre issues while breaking down traditional value judgments. A prime case in point is John Cawelti’s use of such methods to reconsider the traditional dichotomy between “serious” and “popular” literature in favor of the less loaded (and less subjective) terms “inventive” and “formulaic.” Cawelti pointed out, among other things, that by placing these two terms at extreme ends of a continuum, it could be readily seen that all texts lie somewhere in between them, but that none could be called completely inventive or completely formulaic.2 One major advantage to this matrix is that it does not inherently privilege one type of writing over another.

What we will discover from the matrices I have proposed is that both creative nonfiction and journalistic fiction can be manipulated so as to highlight certain aspects of a case but not others, to draw attention to issues that mainstream reporting might deem irrelevant. Even a work that is nearly all fiction, containing only fragments of current events, can be highly effective in using those fragments as a deep underpinning in the text, enough to catch the reader’s attention but at the same time deflecting that attention toward a more important message about what those current events actually mean.

“Literary” versus “expository”

The matrix may also be used to draw some parallels between literary journalism and creative history and biography, on the one hand, and journalistic fiction and historical fiction, on the other. As the figure suggests, works that show a high degree of fidelity to events, yet are literary in tone and style, demonstrating their author’s subjective stake in them, fall into the upper-right quadrant of the diagram, placing them closest to the various forms of creative nonfiction. Texts that show both a detached (objective) written style and a high degree of fidelity to the events (as far as they are known) conform variously to the orthodox “nonfiction” disciplines of history, journalism, and other forms of factual expository writing. On the left side of the diagram, creative, journalistic, and historical fiction have been placed in the upper quadrant but not the lower. This reflects my contention that while a writer might employ a detached style to almost anything, the idea of creative in and of itself suggests a high level of subjectivity, a close connection between the author and the tale she or he spins. In the lower-left quadrant, no doubt risking the wrath of many a colleague and friend, I have placed such ideas as philosophy, critical theory, essay, literary criticism, and so on. This reflects my conviction that most theoretical writing in areas of the humanities (as opposed to the hard sciences) is just one more “reading/interpretation” of a pattern of events; we may believe we are working with facts, but in the end much more comes out of our heads than from the pages of the text. (The present monograph is no exception, let us frankly admit.) Philosophy, similarly, is not so much a “search for truth” as it is a “construction of truths”; a certain way of looking at the world is constructed in the mind of the philosopher, who then tests it against the thought of other philosophers, codifies it by writing it down, and voilà! A new thought system is born. But the philosopher writes much as the expository essayist writes, much as I write, in fact: to inform, not to entertain. (Though happy are those who possess the knack for pulling off both.)

A few comparative examples—this time from historical discourse—will illustrate my point more clearly. Examining the works of historical novelists Gore Vidal and James Clavell, for instance, one discovers that both writers carried out considerable research in preparation for writing their various historical novels but with considerably different results. Vidal, on the one hand, scrupulously researches the events he depicts, from the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate to Abraham Lincoln to Aaron Burr, inventing as few characters and events as possible. And while he necessarily must take some liberties with individual thoughts and dialogue, and his approach to the characters and their events is far from objective (lionizing Burr, for instance, and lampooning George Washington), Vidal’s command of the events he narrates and the detail with which he narrates them is considerable. And Vidal being one of those fortunate few, his writing style is exceptionally entertaining. His works would for the most part belong in the upper-right quadrant of my chart.

The works of James Clavell, on the other hand, while equally (or almost equally) entertaining, occupy a very different point on the chart. Clavell’s 1966 novel Tai-Pan, concerning the Opium Wars and the founding of Hong Kong as a British colony, and his 1975 work Shōgun, about the seventeenth-century founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate, both create entirely fictional casts of characters. Some of these are clearly based on real persons (Shōgun’s “Toranaga” is obviously based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, and “Blackthorne” is meant to represent Will Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan), but most are wholly out of the author’s imagination. Clavell’s approach, moreover, takes such liberties with actual events, characters, and certainly dialogue that his works are closer to epic romance novels than historical ones. Nonetheless, they are, in the most general sense, grounded in actual historical events. Clavell’s novels would belong to the upper-left quadrant of the chart. (If one were to seek a parallel to Vidal-Clavell in, say, the area of creative philosophy, one might place Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum in the upper right, alongside Vidal’s Burr and Lincoln; Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code goes next to Clavell’s Shōgun.)

And what do such texts accomplish? This, too, will depend to a greater or lesser extent on where they lie on the fidelity spectrum, but first and foremost, we must accept that they entertain while at the same time giving life and body to historical events that might otherwise remain localized or obscure. Clavell’s Shōgun, though of little value as a historical text per se, nonetheless brings to life a moment in time—the unification of Japan under a single warlord in the year 1600—of which the average Western reader is likely unaware, as well as introducing certain facets of Japanese culture. At the time of its publication it undoubtedly helped, albeit in rather Orientalist fashion, to popularize Japanese culture just as the Japanese economy was poised to enter its “bubble” period (which has, however, long since “popped”).

Vidal’s texts, on the other hand, show such a high degree of fidelity to their events and major historical figures (all of whom are presented under their real names) that college history professors have been known to include them on their reading lists, if only to provide a more lively account for their students that does not stray massively from the facts as they are known.3 Vidal’s historical biographies, too, are hugely entertaining, bringing wit and humor to past events and even recovering a sense of humanity—of reality—for their participants; Lincoln becomes more than simply a sepia-toned photograph in the novel that bears his name, and readers are given a penetrating—if subjectively drawn—glimpse into his thoughts and actions, as well as those around him, during the American Civil War.

Similar arguments may be made concerning journalistic fiction, but we will find, I think, that this current-events parallel to historical fiction, particularly in Japanese writing, has a tendency to stray rather further from the events that ground it than does its historical counterpart. This has much to do with the liberating effects of the time that separates the present from the historical past, allowing authors a somewhat clearer view of the events they wish to narrate than is normally afforded writers of current events, whose subject matter is the immediate present, frequently misunderstood and often still developing.

Before turning to journalistic fiction, however, let us examine the more established genre of literary journalism, which differs from the former through virtue of its being, by definition, a nonfictional form. Here, too, nomenclature concerns us, for, as will be shown, even the relatively better understood literary journalism remains only imperfectly defined. Among our more important tasks initially will be to determine how, precisely, literary journalism is to be distinguished from other nonfictional forms, such as essay, editorial, or even the “I-novel.”

Toward a Definition of Literary Journalism

The term literary journalism is a contentious one; few have wholly agreed on the true nature of this genre, whose “pedigree,” as theorist Mark Kramer argues, is quite distinguished, dating at least from the eighteenth century, yet whose theorization is a relatively recent thing.4 It is, in fact, only in the past few decades that the genre has been properly named, presumably in part as a response to the so-called New Journalism advanced in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe and other radical journalists.

The body of writing dedicated to defining and exploring literary journalism is nonetheless substantial, and our understanding of this deceptively complex genre grows apace. Superficially, literary journalism is made up of two terms that, while by no means simple or unproblematic, at least tend to conjure comprehensible images in the minds of those who hear them. It is when they are joined that friction develops, for they are—or have become in the minds of many of their practitioners—mutually exclusive endeavors. We understand “literary” prose to suggest subjective writing, expressed in an artistic, entertaining style that carries a strong aroma of the author’s creativity, manipulation of language, setting, characters, plot, and so forth.5 Style (including recent experiments with plainstyle) is nearly always a crucial factor; how something is said matters quite as much—and often more—than what is said.

Journalism, to the contrary, is reputed to be on the objective side of things, a claim made ever more stringently by practicing journalists as academic voices challenge whether language permits the existence of objectivity at all. In actual practice, journalism continues to focus on what is said, and to be interested primarily in four of the five famous W’s: who, what, when, and where; the why—motivation— is murky, messy, and speculative in too many cases to interest the fact-bent daily news reporter. Professional journalists, as a rule, avoid playing with style; are not (supposed to be) allowed to manipulate facts, quotes, or events; refrain from authorial commentary (except in editorial); and generally pursue a self-effacing approach that places events—never the author—at the forefront of the story.

So, how have these two apparently conflicting notions come together? How and why is literature also journalism, and vice versa?

In the first place, like most literary genres, the practice of literary journalism came long before anyone thought to ask what it really was. Some theorists trace the genre back to Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) groundbreaking Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which purported to tell the story of the outbreak of bubonic plague in London in 1665. The work was presented as factual—and to some extent it was—yet also fictional.6 Theorist and literary historian Lennard Davis, on the other hand, argues that news reportage began even earlier, with sixteenth-century “news ballads,” single-sheet printings that covered events of their time, from floods and other natural disasters to the executions of criminals. These, Davis argues, were the first true “novels”:

[I]f we move backward . . . from the full-blown narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the earlier printed prose narratives, we arrive at a common point, what the sixteenth century called “novels”—that is, printed news ballads and tales. The first intersection of print and narrative that was a genuine product of the technology of moveable type (and not simply the printed version of earlier nonprinted forms) was the news ballad of the sixteenth century which was called, among others things, a “novel.” The early prose narratives of the sixteenth century—tales of criminals, brief accounts of jokes and jests, Boccaccio-like love intrigues—were also called “novels.”7

What Davis views as the origin of the modern novel, we may also see as an early form of literary journalism. It is, as Linda Hutcheon argues, only since the nineteenth century that literature and history have been considered mutually exclusive disciplines,8 so why should journalism—history’s close cousin—be different? In fact, in the early “news ballads” we see an urge to tell a story that is both new and news, a genre of writing that, even in its earliest days, surely relied for its very survival on an interested readership eager for fresh tales.

Modern literary journalism since that time has developed its own distinct parameters, despite its lack of a formal, universally accepted definition. Modern literary journalists in the English language—writers like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and dozens more—trace their art back through Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Stephen Crane, Charles Dickens.

But why does literary journalism exist at all? Theorists have considerably differing views on the subject. Arguing that “literary” (here, imaginative) prose is unfairly privileged by an academic readership that disdains the ordinary and temporally bound text (as opposed to the “timelessness” of genuine Art), Phyllis Frus suggests that the genre serves as a means of narrowing the gap in respectability between the “imaginative freedom and creativity” of literary writing and the “discursive and mundane” nature of journalism.9 Seeking to balance these two impulses while privileging neither, theorist Ben Yagoda argues that the genre assumes by its very nature a basis in fact and currency, and that its literary designs lie in the experimental, innovative efforts of its author. He writes, “Innovation is . . . important because, like portrait painting, rebounding, playing blues guitar, or doing quantum physics, high-level literary journalism is a tradition, with each practitioner standing on the shoulders of his or her predecessors.”10 While this is essentially correct, it lends a distinctly Modernist tone to the notion of literary journalism that is not necessarily shared by all. Kramer, for instance, while agreeing with Yagoda about the journalistic demands for factuality and currency, grounds the literary side of the equation in the writer’s subjective “voice,” which in the best cases expresses his or her position vis-à-vis the events narrated and, implicitly, the readers of the text as well: “the narrator of literary journalism has a personality, is a whole person, intimate, frank, ironic, wry, puzzled, judgmental, even self-mocking—qualities academics and daily news reporters dutifully avoid as unprofessional and unobjective.”11

This sort of connectivity between reader and event, bridged by the literary journalist, also lies at the heart of Norman Sims’s various discussions on the functionality of literary journalism, the ultimate purpose of which, in his estimation, is to bring a sense of depth and immediacy to a story that might otherwise be little more (to readers) than a series of nameless, faceless statistics. Its function, therefore, is to rehumanize those caught up in events larger than themselves and at the same time to show us “a very tiny part of the human condition,” for “the facts of the case are woven into a story and consequently become secondary to the tale of the people involved.”12 In a similar vein, Shelley Fisher Fishken sees literary journalism as a social equalizer, for it frequently presents “the stories of people who were dismissed and devalued because they had the ‘wrong’ race, class, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference. They were stories of the powerless, their pain invisible, their cries inaudible, their membership in the human community implicitly denied.”13 Paul Many, on the other hand, argues that it functions to preserve an appropriate intensity of emotional reaction to the events narrated, whereas the vaunted “objectivity” of conventional journalism actually leads to de-sensitization for reporters and readers alike. He writes, “What finally results from an over emphasis on such ‘objectivity’ is a gutless, institutional writing that causes readers to get cynical and jaded, and finally turns many off. Journalists also experience the same blunting of emotion in reporting such stripped-down stage sets of reality.”14

What is gained from the literary journalist’s subjective approach, in contrast, is frequently a story that gets a bit closer to the truth of what happened, if perhaps just a little further away from “the facts.” Of what use are “the facts,” after all, if we lose sight of the human presence embroiled in them? This is the implicit question behind any work of literary journalism, and given the challenges—indeed, we might say impossibility—of recovering “the facts” objectively at all, it may well be, to borrow Sims’s lilting phrase, that “a very tiny part of the human condition” is all we are left with.

It is, I think, this “very tiny part of the human condition” that comes to interest us in our exploration of Murakami’s brand of literary journalism, as it seems to connect solidly with his motivation both for returning to Japan following the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake of January 1995, and for interviewing survivors of the March 20, 1995, sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system, allegedly carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyō cult. His first purpose, as we shall see, was to grasp more clearly the personal responses to the sarin incident of victims and cult members alike, but this was not all; rather, he was also driven by what might be kindly termed a perceived “lack of thoroughness” on the part of the mass media, but might be more accurately expressed as an incurable tendency on the part of the media to oversimplify their reporting in favor of a mentality that opposes “us” (society, normal decent people) to “them” (everyone who does not fit that description). A look at the current structure of the Japanese media, however, may suggest that this is not necessarily the fault of the average reporter in the street, who is bound, willingly or not, to professional organizations and systems that curtail his or her ability to report fully and accurately on the news of the day. Put another way, they, too, are trapped by “ready-made” narratives.

The Role of the Media

If literary journalism is written to shed additional light on stories reported in the so-called mainstream press, then there may be no place in which it is more abidingly important than in Japan, where the media has a reputation—frequently well deserved—for presenting one-sided and often hysterical reports that cast suspected (to say nothing of convicted) criminals into a maximally negative light, while reinforcing a view of society that is peaceful and tranquil and thus wholly apart from the sort of “antisocial” behavior exhibited by the suspect in question.

In fact, the integrity of the Japanese press has been called into question numerous times, for its perceived close relationship with the Japanese “System” of government and business and industry and also for its heavy reliance on so-called kisha-dan or kisha kurabu, “press clubs.” This is worth discussing briefly here, if only to establish that when Murakami, and other novelists like him, engage in the production of creative journalism, whatever its form, they are in fact responding to what is widely perceived as a failure on the part of the mainstream Japanese press to get the full story or to tell it in a fair and objective manner. This makes Japanese literary journalism something of an anomaly, then, for whereas most literary journalism is intended to provide a more subjective perspective on a story that has been presented in too dry and detached a manner, Japanese literary journalists frequently find themselves restoring a sense of balance—even shades of the ever-elusive objectivity—to a story in which the media has whipped public opinion in one direction or another.

One of the most vocal critics of Japanese journalistic practice is Honda Katsuichi, himself a journalist, who describes his profession as “systematized” and blames the fact that journalism is always understood to be a business first, a watchdog for the public second. “The mass media’s connection to the powers that be is a frightful thing indeed. Given the tendency of power to corrupt, it is necessary for journalism to continue to criticize the powerful almost as a matter of course. There cannot be a coincidence of interests.”15 And yet, big business and industry are essentially what keep much of the journalistic enterprise afloat, and thus, to critique such organs of Japanese power would be to bite the hand that feeds one. As just one example, Honda points out that weekly magazines are crippled by the lack of home delivery and are thus forced to depend for their survival on mass subscriptions purchased by the very businesses and companies on whom they ought to be reporting.16 But the real problem, he admits, lies far beyond the mechanics of delivery; it is in the attitude of the reporters themselves, their complacency with a system that essentially tells them what to say. This points yet again to the press clubs and their general function as mouthpieces for the state. “If we are to have press clubs,” argues Honda, “then we need to have a mechanism by which they can resist outside pressure.”17

Murakami Gen’ichi is yet another critic of the press club system and of the manner in which Japanese journalism is practiced in general. While acknowledging that press clubs of various types exist round the world, including in the United States, Murakami Gen’ichi argues that Japanese press clubs throughout the modern period have always been a reminder that news and information, like most everything else in Japan, is “handed down” from those in power. This “handed-down” aspect—echoing “ready-made”—is, he argues, an archaic throwback to the early Meiji period, when imperial decrees were issued, a constitution “promulgated”:

In the fifth year of Meiji, the first imperial tour was conducted over the whole length of Japan. . . . Reporters had to be registered, and only those selected were permitted to attend. Reporters would wait in a special room, and an official from the imperial household would come out and give them the news. The reporters would receive this information reverently and write their reports from it.

Call me cynical, but today’s system of “press clubs” doesn’t strike me as all that different.18

This, obviously, is one of the reasons that newspaper articles are virtually identical whether one reads the Yomiuri, the Asahi, or the Mainichi Shinbun, but the real difficulty, as both Murakami Gen’ichi and Honda would agree, is that members of press clubs—indeed, members of the journalistic profession in general—have little to no latitude to report independently. This is tied in part to access; those who criticize the “powers that be,” as Honda has it, are barred from the press clubs and thus have no access to the information they need to write their stories. Both Yamamoto Taketoshi and Maggie Farley have argued convincingly that such pressures lead to severe limitations in what a reporter can say, and strongly discourage any sort of true investigative reporting for fear that it will implicate those whose patronage is essential for the press club to continue. “The kisha club . . . encourages dependence on sources and skews this balance in their favor. Unity is prized, entrepreneurial reporting is not,” writes Farley. “The close relationships cultivated in and out of the club, therefore, may make the reporters more informed but leave the public less so.”19 The result is a media that cannot fulfill its primary function of disseminating information. William de Lange agrees: “The close and exclusive relationship between reporter and news source poses a direct threat to the integrity of reporting. . . . Needless to say that amongst the Japanese press clubs, where reporters are exposed to the intimations, intimidations, and insinuations of those in power on a daily and, almost as frequent, informal basis, the risk of an excessive and socially unacceptable level of self-censorship is—and has proven to be—very real.”20 Ironically, such uniformity in reporting accentuates the impression that the reporting is accurate; if all the major newspapers and television news outlets report a story at the same time and in the same manner, this is likely to increase the public’s confidence in those news sources. When we factor into this the perception that the Japanese press tends to report stories in such a way that society itself is seen to be blameless, it is not difficult to imagine how something like the Aum Shinrikyō incident of 1995 would have been reported; in essence, the massively simplified reports that painted victims of the incident as (faceless) saints, and the perpetrators as demons were what brought Murakami into the game.

Underground and Underground 2

Murakami’s first step was the 1997 nonfictional work Andāguraundo,21 a collection of some sixty interviews with victims of the sarin attack. Murakami wanted to write about this incident for several reasons. First, he claims, was the fact that the event occurred underground, and the underground has always had a strong appeal for him. Second, having lived abroad in what he terms a “self-imposed exile,” he notes that the distance at which he kept himself separated from his homeland established in him a desire “to gain a more profound knowledge about Japan.”22 This declaration was one of the first signs that the author was moving away from writing only about himself and his own personal dilemmas, beginning to focus more on the problems of the society that had created him.

Ultimately, however, Underground was born out of its author’s sense that the victims of the sarin incident had been left out on their own after the media frenzy had died down. He describes how he happened to read in a magazine the letter of a woman whose husband, left partially disabled by his exposure to the toxic gas, had eventually left his job not because he could no longer work at all, but because his coworkers gradually grew cold toward him and his disability. “Like many people, I suppose,” writes Murakami, “I closed the magazine with a sigh, and went back to my own life.”23

But not for long. Claiming to have been nagged by the lingering sense that the victims of this incident had been peripheralized, Murakami implicitly puts his finger on the very issue I seek to discuss here:

Why wasn’t it enough that these unfortunates had had to suffer the injury of the sarin incident itself? Why should they have had to suffer twice, victim also of the violence of the ordinary society that surrounds us all?24

What Murakami signifies by the expression “the violence of the ordinary society that surrounds us all” is the tendency of Japanese society to distance itself not only from criminals but also from their victims—indeed, from anyone perceived as different, as if they existed in a “separate world,” as he expresses it. In other words, mainstream Japanese are uncomfortable with the notion of either criminal or victim existing in “ordinary” society, and thus seek to locate such things in some conveniently “other” space where they cannot threaten the illusion of tranquility and stability in Japan’s so-called homogenous society.

One of the principal results of Underground, then, is that it narrows the gap between “ordinary society” and the “other,” demonstrating that these events, though peripheralized, in fact spring from society, rather than existing in an external zone to threaten society from the outside. In this work, Murakami confronts his readers with the uncomfortable possibility that neither crime nor those involved with it are separate from ordinary Japanese, and thus ordinary Japanese can no longer afford to imagine that they transcend such matters. Put another way, he confronts them with their own implicit culpability as members of a flawed society.

This point becomes clearer in Murakami’s follow-up work on the subject, Yakusoku sareta basho de: Underground 2 (1998; At the place that was promised: Underground 2), in which the author presents interviews with members of the Aum Shinrikyō in an effort to learn more about what motivated them to join an organization that would be responsible for such an act. His purpose here is twofold: first, to portray the cult members not as psychologically flawed beings but as ordinary members of society seeking an alternative to the confining rules of the Japanese social structure; and second, to expose the fundamental lack in mainstream society of an alternative to what I have been terming the “group narrative” of the Japanese system, for those who reject this “group narrative” as unfulfilling or even as false have few socially acceptable means by which to develop their own individual narratives free from mainstream ideology. This, in part, is what leads people to turn to the likes of Asahara Shōkō and the Aum Shinrikyō; Japan’s social system does not provide them with anything better on which to rely. As Murakami writes in Underground 2,

Our reality is that beneath the main “system” of Japanese society there exists no subsystem, no safety net, to catch those who slip through the cracks. This reality has not changed as a result of the [sarin] incident. There is a basic gap in our society, a black hole of sorts, and no matter how thoroughly we stamp out the Aum Shinrikyō, similar groups are certain to form in the future to bring about the same kinds of disasters.25

The author is not defending the Aum Shinrikyō or its actions; indeed, he is careful to express his own outrage at their behavior. “I still feel deep anger toward . . . those members of Aum Shinrikyō who carried out the sarin incident in the subways,”26 he writes in his prologue, but he is also inclined to view the question of guilt and innocence here as a complex one, encompassing not only the cult and its members but the social systems—particularly the education system—that have in a sense forced them either to conform to the collective system/narrative or to seek a system/narrative that lies outside social boundaries, on the periphery. Murakami attacks the simplistic portrayal in the mass media of the cult as “evil,” and the victims—indeed, the rest of Japanese society—as “pure.” This is clear throughout the epilogue to Underground, in which he writes:

The perspective of the mass media in disseminating infor mation about this incident has taken the form of a sim plistic opposition, consisting of “our side,” meaning “victims=purity=justice,” and “their side,” meaning “criminals=befoulment=evil.”27

Obviously the question is not so simple for Murakami, who seeks to restore a sense of identity to the victims of the incident and at the same time recognizes, none too comfortably, certain likenesses between himself and the cult members, particularly in his sense of being somehow different from others in Japanese society in his rejection of social conformity. Writing of his interviews with cult members in Underground 2, the author admits that “sitting side by side talking with them, I could not escape the sense that there were points of similarity between what I seek in writing novels and what they sought through their religion.”28 What Murakami has always sought in his writing, as I have argued repeatedly in this monograph, is a means to make sense of the world around him and his own role in it. In a word, he seeks to connect with a more intensely profound, even spiritual, aspect of his identity, to connect with his individual inner narrative, and he hopes to show others, if not exactly how to do this, then at least that it can be done and that such inquiries can help his readers to understand their role in the world, too.

This, he argues, is also what the cult members sought in their religious beliefs, but in the end they failed to find their own inner narrative and instead gave themselves up to the twisted, “cure-all” ideology of Asahara Shōkō. A number of present and former members of Aum interviewed by Murakami echoed the statement of Kano Hiroyuki, who told him that “‘no questions remain. Every question is answered fully. Everything has been solved. If you do this, then this will be the result. Whatever question you might pose, the answer comes instantly.’”29 This sense of being able to ask any question and have a clear, definitive response must have been extremely attractive, particularly to people who had sought out involvement in religion due to overwhelming doubts about the purpose of life; it would also have made it easier, however, for those same troubled people to abandon the quest for their own internal narratives—the answers that lay within themselves—in favor of yet another type of “ready-made” narrative.

Murakami does not suggest absolution for the Aum cult, but he does present a new and more understanding view of its members, many—perhaps most—of whom in the end simply fell under the same sort of spell that captures most members of society, that of the “group narrative” presented as absolute fact, Barthes’s “myth” yet again. His comparison with the Japanese militarist state of the 1930s and 1940s is telling here; he notes to the same interviewee that “‘a segment of the Japanese population regarded the emperor as a god and were willing to die for him,’”30 but in raising that “certain segment of the Japanese population,” does he not also evoke the memory that the entire nation followed that “certain segment” into the most destructive war (for Japan and the victims of its aggression) in Japanese history? This was yet one more “group narrative,” infinitely more devastating than that of the Aum cult. While appearing to expose the absurdity of the Aum members’ acceptance of Asahara’s “ready-made” narrative, then, Murakami reminds his readers indirectly that in the not-so-distant past, the entire nation did something very similar. And thus, without stating anything outright, this text has the potential to stir empathy, if not actual sympathy, toward those in Japanese society who, in seeking an alternative to “acceptable” group narratives offered by society, stray into the web of other, less acceptable ones. Such people, he seems to say, are not so different from everyone else. They were simply driven into the waiting arms of Asahara Shōkō because mainstream society offered no real answers to their particular questions.

Accordingly, Murakami urges his readers to look at the unusual, the unfamiliar, as a potentially valuable part of their world, rather than as something threatening that lurks outside it. He challenges them to look for the flaws, the gaps, in their own system that force some members of Japanese society to reject its structure and seek something more unique, individual, and meaningful. He indicts the rigidity of the dominant social system and, more importantly, questions the validity of its motivation in preserving the so-called kanri shakai, or “managed society.” At the same time, he implicitly indicts the mass media’s symbiotic relationship with the powerfully homogeneous and homogenizing social system it serves.

Works like Underground and Underground 2 thus represent an essential part of that implicit challenge, for they offer an alternative view of a major event in which public sentiment is powerfully biased and emotional. We might liken this to public sentiment in the United States in the months following the 9/11 attacks; would any professional journalist in his right mind have dared present a side of the story that attempted to understand (let alone empathize with) the motives of the terrorists? Yet it is precisely in such cases, when questions of “right” and “wrong” seem established beyond the capacity for doubt, that expressions like these are needed most, for literary journalism is very likely the only form of an “opposition press” Japan will ever have.31

From Creative Nonfiction to Journalistic Fiction

Perhaps even more interesting than Murakami’s literary journalism is what I am calling journalistic fiction, that is, purely fictional texts that are to a greater or lesser extent grounded in current or recent news events. This type of writing, I suspect, will prove somewhat more contentious as a genre than literary journalism, if only because it lacks any body of theoretical writing to support it, a “proper pedigree,” as Kramer expresses it. Even the name is little more than an expedient constructed for purposes of this text.

Nomenclature aside, one could probably make the argument that all works of fiction contain traces of the events that were current during its writing; does this mean that those works are also journalistic fiction? In my view this would be a weak argument, but it is not difficult to see how such a genre could run the same theoretical gauntlet as something like autobiographical fiction, given that virtually any text will contain traces of its author’s life and experiences. Yet few would be foolish enough to suggest that every text is autobiographical. It does seem quite clear, nonetheless, that some texts, wittingly or not, do have greater potential than others to awaken in their readers’ minds a connection with current, newsworthy events. I would further argue that in numerous cases this is intentional, the purpose being to raise public awareness about an event (perhaps without seeming to do so) and at the same time to retell that event from a new perspective, perhaps even with different results. For true though the current events may be upon which the work of journalistic fiction is founded, in the final analysis such texts are still fiction and are thus liberated from the constraints of fidelity to fact that (normally) govern literary journalism and other types of creative nonfiction.32

If, then, we apply the same logic and motivation for literary journalism to this close cousin we are calling journalistic fiction, we may note two things: first, that the motivation is virtually identical, that is, to tell the story in a more in-depth and revealing manner than is possible using orthodox journalistic methods; and second, that the parameters—the “rules,” so to speak—of journalistic fiction prove to be considerably more liberating even than those of literary journalism. This is because the author is now freed from literary journalism’s first principle, namely, that the story must adhere to the basic facts of the case. Abandoning this principle means that a story may be constructed using some or all of the actual conditions that apply in a current event—in fact, it must by definition contain some of these elements, and they must be sufficiently current in the public mind for the genre to achieve its purpose—yet may be couched in a new narrative altogether. What such works do, in essence, is re-create the conditions present in a story told in the media but explore it from a much more imaginative perspective. For example, at a time when truancy (futōkō) was becoming a serious social problem in Japan, Murakami Ryū (one of Japan’s most prolific writers of journalistic fiction) took up the topic in his novel Kibō no kuni no ekusodasu (2000; Exodus to the promised land), in which he posited the question, “what might happen if several hundred thousand junior high school students suddenly refused to attend school?”33 A number of his other works from the late 1990s and into this century work in similar areas. His response to a series of horrific murders targeting homeless people and teenage prostitutes in the Kabuki-chō district of Tokyo resulted in the novel In za miso sūpu (1997; In the miso soup), while “compensated dating” (enjo kōsai, a euphemism for teenage prostitution) and its causes are discussed in Rabu & Poppu (1996; Love & pop). The hikikomori (shut-in) phenomenon is explored in Kyōseichū (2000; Symbiotic worm), the end of which is chilling, as it mimics the execution of the sarin gas attack against the Tokyo subway system, complete with vinyl bags full of liquid nerve gas being punctured with pointed sticks (the Aum perpetrators used the sharpened ends of umbrellas).

My point is that writers are incorporating current events into their fiction, and that these intrusions of the actual world are not incidental but actually drive the narrative forward and, more importantly, raise readers’ expectations about how the narrative will develop based on their knowledge of those current events.

In the case of Murakami Haruki, Kafka on the Shore could be read in these terms. Murakami’s decision to narrate the story through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy rather than his customary thirtyish, lackadaisical underachiever probably surprised many readers and certainly caught the attention of critics, some of whom suggested that Murakami was trying to “look back upon his own youth,”34 while others claimed he meant to “return to his own beginnings as a novelist.”35 This may also be true, but why would he choose this particular time to go back to his roots? If we historicize Kafka on the Shore in the context of the infamous Sakakibara incident of 1997, on the other hand, we gain a different perspective on Murakami’s young hero.

It was the Sakakibara incident that brought the expression “Shōnen A” (Youth A) into the consciousness of the public at large. “Shōnen A” is a generic term used by police and the media to refer to underage criminal suspects, whom the law does not permit to be identified by name, and this is how the teenage suspect in the murder of Hase Jun, a primary school student, was known after he allegedly abducted the boy, then killed and dismembered him, leaving his head in a plastic bag in front of a nearby elementary school. Accompanying this gruesome artifact was a note, emblazoned with a swastika, that read, “The game begins . . . Stupid police stop me if you can . . . I enjoy killing so much I can hardly stand it.”36 Eventually the boy was caught, and his case began a public debate that lasted for several years concerning the perception that Japanese young people were more violent and out of control than at any other period in history. This public discussion would have coincided with the time Murakami was writing Kafka on the Shore.

The Sakakibara incident—named for the Osaka suburb in which it took place—was so horrifying, in fact, that this particular Shōnen A became, for all intents and purposes, the Shōnen A in the public mind, and those who used the term in casual conversation for years after the incident could be understood to mean the fourteen-year-old boy who had killed Hase Jun. A variety of books emerged in the immediate aftermath of this case, most attempting to explain how a mere teenager could commit so vicious an act, and a variety of details about the home life of Shōnen A became public knowledge. Among those who had the chance to interview this boy was Takayama Fumihiko, much of whose reportage in recent years has focused on young people and the challenges they face in contemporary Japanese society. Among other things, Takayama learned that the boy’s home, while not particularly unusual, did show a certain proclivity for isolating its members; each room in the house had at least one television/video combination, so that family members could and did pass considerable periods of time without interacting at all. The one thing they did share was a powerful hostility toward cats, shooting with a BB gun at any unfortunate stray who wandered into their garden, ostensibly because the cats ate the food put out for the family dog and left feces all over the garden.

Shōnen A, however, appears to have taken the matter further and from an early age made a habit of killing and dissecting slugs and frogs, later expanding his mutilations to cats unfortunate enough to wander too close, until “by the time he graduated from elementary school there was not a stray cat to be found in his neighborhood.”37 Takayama also notes the boy’s obsession with Hitler—that he had read Mein Kampf multiple times and was fascinated by documentary videos about the Holocaust—and his habit of inscribing swastikas all over his bedroom.

Into the context of such public disclosures, then, Murakami introduces Tamura Kafka, a recently fourteen-year-old boy (the novel begins on his fifteenth birthday) who, albeit by proxy, becomes responsible for the bloody murder of his own father. And while the practice of mutilating cats has now been transferred to the father rather than the son, its prominent role in the novel is nonetheless noteworthy, and one cannot help reflecting that we are unlikely to find any stray cats in his neighborhood, either. Later, as Kafka hides out from the police in the cabin belonging to Ōshima’s older brother on the edge of the very metaphysical woods we have already explored at some length, he discovers and reads with considerable interest not Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf but rather a history of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the logistical brains behind Hitler’s “final solution.” This leads him to consider the nature of the relationship between responsibility and imagination, and he reasons by association that the murder of his father, which appears to have occurred in the realm of the imagination, is in fact his own responsibility, marked by the blood he has quite literally on his hands.

This is, admittedly, what a court of law would call “circumstantial evidence” of a causal connection between the Sakakibara incident and Kafka on the Shore, and it is only fair to disclose that Murakami himself, asked directly by me whether he had been thinking of Shōnen A as he wrote Kafka on the Shore, responded casually that it had not crossed his mind.38 However, even if we set aside the fact that, as a novelist, Murakami is a professional teller of lies (and an extraordinarily good one), we cannot ignore the fact that authors do not exert total control over what goes into their works. We therefore ought not to exclude the possibility that, on a subliminal level, the author’s humanist concerns for the youth-related problems, forefront in Japan’s collective imagination at the time, found their way into this scenario in which a young man, though evidently responsible for his father’s death, is still redeemable.

Subliminally or not, Murakami fiction does not serve to excuse criminal behavior nor does it deny guilt. What it does do is to imagine a similar set of conditions or characteristics, while offering readers an in-depth look inside the mind of the principal character (and it would be difficult to deny that we have a very detailed look at the inside of Kafka’s mind), thus allowing them to understand better what has motivated his behavior. It may well be true that Murakami never had the original Shōnen A consciously in mind (and let us again emphasize the word consciously) while writing Kafka, but this does not finally matter; some of his readers undoubtedly were thinking and wondering about that boy as they engaged the character of Tamura Kafka, and this matters very much.

We see a similar impulse, though with rather less specific clues, in After Dark, which like a lot of Murakami’s writing in recent years deals with trauma, but which also touches on some of the more common social issues capturing the attention of the mass media and public at large. Unlike Murakami Ryū, who is fairly explicit about the current events that fuel his novels, Murakami Haruki tends to weave such matters more subtly into the overall narrative, so that they are apt to go unnoticed by some readers, while catching the attention of others.

One social issue that was in the news around the time Murakami was writing After Dark was a dramatic rise in the number of Chinese nationals illegally residing in Japan, many living in dangerously cramped conditions (six or eight people in an apartment designed for one). Even more disturbing, however, were the stories of Chinese smuggled into Japan to work in prostitution rings and “sweat shops” operated by Chinese gangsters. Public opinion, following the media, tended at this time to lump such illegal immigrants together, focusing more on the fact that they were in Japan against the law than the fact that they were victims of human trafficking, inhumanely treated and living in substandard conditions. Even in cases where the media acknowledged the desperate conditions at home that had led these people to risk illegal entry into Japan, they tended to overlook the fact that a booming trade existed—and probably still exists—that exploited such people, either as cheap labor or as workers in the sex trade. In telling the story of Guo Dong-li, then, and in giving us even a tiny glimpse of her situation, Murakami puts before his readers not only the fact that she is a human being in an inhuman situation, but that she is caught between two extremely dangerous entities: the Chinese mafia and a brutal Japanese customer, who is apparently immune from punishment.

If Guo Dong-li represents a “non-person,” outside the protection of Japanese law, Mari herself occupies a position in Japanese society that lies somewhere on the periphery. We learn midway through the novel that Mari’s fluency in Chinese comes from the fact that she could not cope with the Japanese school system and that she became a futōkō, one who refuses to attend school. This, too, was a major issue, not only for the Japanese media but for local PTA chapters as well. In the summer of 2002, for instance, it was reported that the Japanese truancy level had doubled during the previous decade and had risen 3 percent in just the previous two years.39 Rampant bullying, severe competition among students, and overpowering pressure to conform are frequently cited as the principal causes of this phenomenon, and Mari’s comments to the manager of the love hotel might have been made by any of the more than one hundred thousand children refusing to attend school at the time After Dark was being conceived:

“I never much liked competing with others for grades. I wasn’t good at sports, had trouble making friends, and I was bullied, so by my third year in elementary school I just couldn’t go anymore.”

“You refused to go to school?”

“I couldn’t stand the idea of it, so I would vomit up whatever I had eaten, upset my stomach horribly.”40

In the same conversation, Mari explains that she finally elected to attend a school for Chinese children in Yokohama, and expresses what might well be Murakami’s own idea of progress in the Japanese education system: “‘Half of the classes were taught in Chinese, but unlike in Japanese schools, you didn’t have to scrabble around for grades. . . . You didn’t have to have special qualifications or anything.’”41

Mari explains that her parents never liked the idea of her attending this Chinese school, nor were they particularly excited by her prospects afterwards. “‘They were hoping I’d go on to some famous prep school, eventually be a lawyer or a doctor or something.’”42 There is nothing particularly troubling in and of itself about parents indulging such dreams for their children, but Murakami touches on a more basic and insidious reality in the Japanese education system: that there is but one path to true success, and it leads through one of the various socially identified and accepted “good” schools. Where Mari was peripheralized at her Japanese school for not being good at what the other children were good at (and what the adults wanted them to be good at), she found acceptance and friendship among the children of an “alien” race, like all foreigners kept carefully outside of mainstream Japanese society. Like those who, seeking alternatives, joined the Aum cult, Mari has been forced to live out her life “underground,” first in Yokohama and later in the dark and mysterious scenery of Tokyo’s after-hours, reading novels at all-night Denny’s restaurants, taking the occasional break to rescue a Chinese sex slave beaten up by a customer like Shirakawa, who represents the successful types who went to the “right” national universities.

Fictional Realities and Real Fictions

From time to time one finds a novelist offering dual works—one in the literary journalistic mode, the other written as journalistic fiction—on exactly the same story. These cases, while admittedly rare, permit us an opportunity to examine some of the merits and limitations of each mode of writing and to consider what the point might be of using both. In all the cases of which I am aware, the work of literary journalism comes first, followed, after some interval, by the journalistic fiction version thereof. This is not surprising, given that journalism is more concerned with immediacy than fiction needs to be.

One highly interesting and useful example of Japanese journalistic fiction from the twentieth century comes from novelist and journalist Kaikō Takeshi (1930–89), who debuted at almost exactly the same time as 1994 Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935). Kaikō never enjoyed the exalted literary reputation that Ōe attained, in part because he never altogether matched Ōe’s imaginative or intellectual genius, but probably also in part because he diverted his talents toward commercial writing—Kaikō spent several years writing public relations copy for Kotobukiya, the company that later became Suntory—as well as journalism. In the latter field, Kaikō made a name for himself when he traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960.

In 1964, however, Kaikō achieved real acclaim as a creative journalist. In November of that year, Kaikō accepted an assignment to travel to Saigon to report on the increased U.S. military presence in South Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin incident the previous August. He remained in Saigon until late March of the following year, publishing regular reports—chiefly on the lives of Vietnamese living in and around Saigon—in the Asahi Shinbun. Many of his reports were humorous and frequently featured himself, fishing in the Mekong River, trying local foods, using the open-air toilets (“philosophy huts”) that Vietnamese farmers made above the irrigation ditches that surrounded their fields.

Aside from the almost daily rumors of coup d’état plots in Saigon, most of Kaikō’s reports read more like travelogues than accounts of a shooting war. Just two events occurred that reminded readers unmistakably that this was a war: one was the execution by firing squad of Le Van Khuyen on January 28, 1965, which Kaikō witnessed and reported with considerable shock and horror; the second, which involved him more directly, was the poetically named Operation Fallen Leaves, a rather unpoetic search-and-destroy mission carried out by two hundred South Vietnamese army regulars in the jungle areas north of Ben Cat, roughly thirty kilometers north of Saigon, on February 14, 1965. Shortly after noon the unit was ambushed by Vietcong guerillas, caught in a murderous cross fire, and cut to pieces. Running for their lives back to the base camp at Ben Cat, Kaikō and his photographer managed to survive, along with just seventeen of the original two hundred ARVN troops. A week later the two Japanese flew home, and within a month Kaikō had published a book of literary journalism titled Betonamu senki (1965; Vietnam war journal). The work was an instant best seller.

Three years later he published the novel Kagayakeru yami (1968; translated as Into a Black Sun), a work that covers precisely the same period of time and in fact many of the same events, including the execution of Le Van Khuyen and Operation Fallen Leaves. However, the fictional work adds certain new elements. First, Khuyen’s execution is now written as two executions, on consecutive days; witnessing the first, Kaikō’s protagonist responds with revulsion, much as he did in the Betonamu senki, but in the second he shows almost no emotion at all, as though he has now been desensitized to the violence that only yesterday caused him such angst.

A second major development in Into a Black Sun is the inclusion of fully developed characters, most or all of whom are composites of the many people Kaikō met while he was there. These characters include the protagonist’s errand boy, named Tran, whose conscription into the South Vietnamese Army becomes a point of anguish; and Tran’s older sister, To-nga, who provides romantic interest for the protagonist. Kaikō may have been imitating Graham Greene’s Fowler and his Phuong in The Quiet American, or perhaps he had in mind his colleague Okamura Akihiko (1929–85), whose own work of creative nonfiction Minami Vetonamu sensō jūgunki (1965; Record of an embedded reporter in the South Vietnam War) begins—and is punctuated from time to time—with Okamura’s letters to his lover in Thailand, a woman named Soo-nee.

Kaikō’s two works are useful here because they allow us to examine comparatively two texts—one of literary journalism, the other of journalistic fiction—by a lone author on a single set of events, and in doing so to consider key questions about the relative strengths and limitations of each genre. Why was it necessary to write a second work, this time a fictional one? What, specifically, was Kaikō able to share with his readers in Into a Black Sun that could not be adequately told in the Betonamu senki?

The simplest response to this is that he is able to redirect the energy of the story and its events in a direction that is simply not possible in a work of journalism, even if it is couched in the tropes of creative writing. Despite the fact that Kaikō is a constant presence in the Betonamu senki, as authors frequently are in literary journalism, in the end the story is about the war itself and the myriad people who are caught up in it. Kaikō may record his reactions to it, but he cannot, finally, make it about himself, and as a novelist this is among his favorite and most compelling topics. However, what happened to him as he watched the execution of Le Van Khuyen and as he ran for his life out of the jungle back to Ben Cat was profound and life-changing for him, and in the fictional framework of Into a Black Sun he is able to explore those events more freely. This helps us to understand why the “young terrorist” in his story must be shot twice in Into a Black Sun: the first time is to record the actual event and his response, while the second allows us a look at a second Kaikō, the one who is (now) unaffected by such events, a cool and detached reporter who remains aloof, an observer, a voyeur.

Kaikō experienced considerable angst with regard to his observer’s role, and Into a Black Sun allows him to bring this issue to the forefront of the narrative on an existential level, to interrogate his commitment to the world outside himself and how this affects the meaning of his own existence. As the narrator of Into a Black Sun observes the people of Saigon, coping with poverty, corruption, and the war itself, he wonders why he is incapable of taking a side. It occurs to him that if he could kill with his own hands, then this might give him an understanding of the conflict and the men fighting it, and at the same time, he would gain the sense of being that comes with making a choice. This becomes the motivation for his narrator’s participation in Operation Fallen Leaves, now no longer just a news story for the Asahi Shinbun but an existentialist exercise in choice, action, and consequence. Unfortunately for Kaikō’s narrator, when the bullets fly and the moment for action is upon him, he proves incapable of firing a shot even in defense of his life, and leaves Vietnam a broken man.

Cases of this type of “double exposure” reporting are admittedly rare, but fiction that takes up a semijournalistic role is not as unusual as we might imagine. In the wake of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake a number of interesting works of fiction and nonfiction emerged, from the “reports” of major writers such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kikuchi Kan (the latter of whom, in true Modernist form, displays an erotic fixation on accounts of nude women rushing into the streets to escape the flames and destruction),43 to poet Nagata Mikihiko’s (1887–1964) novelistic memoir Daichi wa furuu (1923; The great earth shakes).44 This writerly response to disaster occurred after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake (better known outside of Japan as the Kobe earthquake) as well, with the production of texts like Tanaka Yasuo’s Kōbe shinsai nikki (1996; Kobe earthquake diary), an account of Tanaka’s volunteer efforts following the disaster; Oda Makoto’s Fukai oto (2002; Deep sound), a fictional work detailing how and why relief efforts proved ineffectual in the first hours and days after the earthquake; and of course Murakami Haruki’s Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (2000; translated as After the Quake), a fanciful collection of short stories that seldom touch upon the Kobe earthquake directly but deal more with the posttraumatic stress, and in some cases the pretraumatic stress, of a nation that lives in constant threat of natural disasters.

Japan’s most recent disaster, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, has also occasioned a number of reports, including one interesting example of this sort of “double exposure” fiction. It comes in the form of novelist Kawakami Hiromi’s (b. 1956) short story “Kamisama” (1993; Gods), a simple fairy tale of a woman who is invited out for a picnic by a friendly bear somewhere in rural northern Japan. While out, they take a pleasant stroll along a riverbank crowded with people fishing, and enjoy a picnic. Later the woman naps, and upon awakening discovers that the bear has brought her a gift of fresh fish. At the end of their day together the bear wraps her in his massive arms and pronounces a kind of benediction: “‘May the blessings of the Bear God be showered upon you!’”45

Three months after the tsunami and not long after the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, Gunzō republished this story, along with the updated “Kamisama 2011,” in which virtually the same story is presented but with certain significant alterations. In the new version, an ominous occurrence known as “that event” (ano koto) is constantly foregrounded: “in early spring I had gone out, dressed in protective clothing, to observe the snipe, but this was the first time since ‘that event’ that I had come out in normal clothing, exposing my skin, with a picnic lunch.”46 As the woman and bear approach the river, there are still people out fishing but only adults, all wearing radiation suits, protective masks, and rubber boots up to their hips. The narrator admits she is envious of the bear, since “‘you are hardly affected at all by strontium or plutonium,’”47 and when she returns home, the bear’s benediction strikes the reader as rather pointless as the woman uses her personal Geiger counter to check her skin radiation levels.

This retelling of the original pleasant fairy tale as a kind of nightmarish sci-fi horror story never mentions by name the nuclear disaster that was even then unfolding at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, yet it powerfully foregrounds this “event,” whose real implications for Japan’s natural environment and for the people living in that area are still not fully clear. It is a study in contrasts, paradise and paradise lost, and while it differs from the Kaikō Takeshi example in that both stories are fiction, it does illustrate how a work of journalistic fiction, particularly when used in this “double exposure” manner, can signify a great deal while saying nothing explicitly. For her own part, Kawakami noted the following in her brief epilogue to the two stories:

I did not write this story in order to warn people about the dangers accompanying the use of nuclear power. Rather, I wanted to say that our everyday life would continue, and yet, there was a chance we would see great alterations in certain aspects of that everyday life, and I wanted to express the shock that would accompany that realization.48

Despite the obviously fictional nature of the work, the pointed intrusion of “that event” at key points in the narrative ironically lends this fantasy tale a greater sense of immediacy and reality than a news story might be able to do. In reminding us that we can no longer take for granted the pleasure of walking along a riverbank, having a picnic, catching fish, Kawakami tells us nothing particularly new about the Fukushima meltdown, yet she has somehow concretized a story that had been reduced, in the mainstream news, to a series of statistical reports that taught the general public words like becquerel but could not tell them how the disaster might affect them in their daily lives.

Double Exposure: 1Q84

Murakami, too, succeeds in creating a kind of “double exposure” in 1Q84, and while I do not suggest that we read this novel merely as a fictionalized retelling of the stories in Underground and Underground 2, it is possible to discern some of the issues Murakami unearthed in those two nonfictional works in 1Q84 as well, and thus I propose to read the work from the perspective of journalistic fiction to see whether any fresh insights become apparent. The working assumption of this section is that the cult portrayed in 1Q84 as “Sakigake” is a fictional depiction of the Aum Shinrikyō, or a cult very like it, in its earliest phases.

Unlike Kaikō Takeshi, Murakami is not particularly interested in redirecting any of this story back onto himself in 1Q84, chiefly because none of his protagonists actually represents him, but also because, unlike Kaikō, he was never directly involved in the events that become prominent in these narratives, that is, the formation of the cult itself and the rise to quasi-sacred status of the cult’s leader. For this reason, Murakami is able to remain focused on the process by which these two phenomena develop, and offer an imaginative, highly revealing scenario for them.

In so doing, there can be little question that the voices of the various Aum Shinrikyō members Murakami interviewed for Underground 2 made their way, with or without the author’s awareness, into the narrative flow, along with some of the media and public attitudes that attended the Aum case. There were intellectuals and manual laborers, artists, schoolteachers, and engineers in Aum; some sought meaning in life; others, merely change from their everyday existence. Quite a number sought actual salvation and genuinely believed in the sacred powers of Asahara Shōkō. Some of these people are shown in the novel through generalized descriptions—chiefly provided by Professor Ebisuno, Fukaeri’s guardian after she fled Sakigake—of the types of people who joined that organization in its early days. “‘People with farming skills, healthy people who could handle harsh physical labor were sought. . . . There were also professionals with higher education. Doctors, engineers, educators, accountants—people like that were also welcomed into the collective since their skills were useful.’”49 Characters like “Ponytail” and “the Monk,” the Leader’s bodyguards, are probably typical: highly devout and spiritually committed but basically stupid, unimaginative, and amateurish. Finally, of course, there is the Leader himself, who bears little resemblance to Asahara Shōkō, it is true, but whose charisma and power—including actual spiritual power—seem to represent the beliefs of Asahara’s followers. (Asahara’s widely touted ability to levitate is transformed in 1Q84 to the Leader making a stone clock float in midair before Aomame’s eyes.)

As noted, Murakami has expressed no interest in recuperating the image of the Aum Shinrikyō specifically, and least of all Asahara Shōkō; what he does succeed in doing through 1Q84 is to suggest how the story might have turned out with an actual spiritualist as a leader, someone who truly could hear and interpret the voices from “over there.” A second, but no less critical, motivation for Murakami is to offer an alternative image to that provided in the Japanese mass media, if only to demonstrate that their simplistic “good versus evil” construct is not the only way to conceptualize the cult and its members. Public opinion toward the Aum Shinrikyō was so uniformly negative in Japan following the media blitz (which, to be fair, was fed by public cries for vengeance) that former members could not find work or even apartments to rent, for they were, in most people’s eyes, guilty by association. Murakami suggests through his narrative that merely belonging to a cult (a highly loaded term to begin with) does not make one a criminal, and (somewhat more riskily) that not all the members of Aum were bad. Most, like his characters “Ponytail” and “the Monk,” were simply unimaginative.

A reading such as this does carry with it certain risks, foremost of which is the suggestion that eavesdropping on the author’s thinking during the act of creation is advisable or even possible. This is particularly true when dealing with Murakami Haruki, who has always maintained that he does not plan out his narratives but allows them to flow organically from his imagination. But planning the narrative and selecting its subject matter are two different things. Murakami notes, for instance, that when he was preparing to write A Wild Sheep Chase, “‘I used “sheep” as a key word, but the only thing I was sure of was that, at the end of the story, “Boku” on this side and “Rat” from the other side would be brought together.’”50 We can just as easily imagine him saying, “I used ‘cult’ as a key word, but the only thing I was sure of was that at the end of the story ‘Tengo’ and ‘Aomame’ would be brought together. . . .” Whereas the “Sheep” in A Wild Sheep Chase has every appearance of a random image, the notion of the cult is anything but random, and the similarities between the formation of “Sakigake” and that of Aum Shinrikyō are difficult to ignore.

More importantly, if we choose to read a work like 1Q84 for its quasi-journalistic qualities, then the very nature of journalistic fiction, as with historical fiction, fairly demands that we acknowledge the role of the writer as selector and organizer of the events to be presented, and it is necessary to assume that such writers—including Murakami—must make choices with regard to characters and descriptions, even in an “organically evolving” narrative, if it is to accomplish its purpose. Why, for instance, does Murakami elect to depict the Leader as a man of such physical and spiritual size and power yet, ultimately, as a mere tool to be used by the cult? Why are “Ponytail” and “the Monk” shown to be bungling amateurs? And why, in fact, are all the characters, from Tengo and Aomame to Ayumi and Tamaru, presented as somehow “slightly off,” standing just outside mainstream society? Is it not because so many of the people Murakami met from the Aum Shinrikyō actually fit that description in some manner or other? All were looking for something, just as everyone in 1Q84, whether actually or figuratively, is looking for something, including its two heroes; Tengo seeks his inner wellspring, his “narrative,” and Aomame seeks him. Both Tengo and Aomame are somehow “outside” the mainstream, and it is not difficult to imagine that even these two, given the right circumstances, might have been drawn to the Leader—a “true prophet”—for their spiritual guidance. Where else, after all, are they to seek it?

Among those Murakami interviewed from the Aum cult for Underground 2, young Kanda Miyuki seems to have made a particularly strong impression on him. Reflecting that she was only sixteen when she joined the Aum cult, and apparently an actual mystic, Murakami not only understands why she joined a group like Aum but argues that Japanese society should make a place for her, and soon. “I can think of no reason why there should not be a few people in our world who think seriously about matters that are not directly useful to society. The problem is, besides the Aum Shinrikyō, there are few effective ‘nets’ in which to catch such people.”51

It is only natural that Murakami would be drawn to someone like Kanda, who describes her dreams and her reality as being indistinguishable. Is this an expression of schizophrenia, or is she actually channeling the “other world” directly into her conscious mind? Murakami himself does not presume to know, but he is clearly impressed with her apparently natural ability to attain what many seek through ascetic practice and he, as a novelist, must seek through daily toil, that is, direct connection with his inner mind—his dreamscape—while writing in a conscious state. If we attempt to connect her to 1Q84, Kanda reminds us of Fukaeri, whose direct link to the Little People—the gods themselves—makes her, as we saw earlier, an ideal oracular mouthpiece but also (like dreams themselves) an enigma in the ordinary, secular world. Put another way, Fukaeri, like Kanda, is problematic in a society that has no particular objection to fantasy fiction or virtual reality but is intolerant of anyone with the temerity to claim that her “visions” might actually be real.

This returns us to an important thematic point from the previous chapter, wherein individual spiritual experience was contrasted with shared, inherited doctrine. Mirroring the inherent inability of industrialized societies to accept direct divine experience as valid, one of the central ironies present in 1Q84 is that many—maybe most— of the same people who pursue religious traditions that began with direct mystical experiences are nonetheless intensely mistrustful of—even hostile toward—living people who claim to have had similar experiences. There is no place in modern, “normal” society for those who have left their bodies, visited other worlds, found enlightenment, conversed with God. Such events belong to ancient times, or to fiction; suggest otherwise and one is dismissed as a mental case. One of the deeper messages of 1Q84 is thus identical to one of the deeper messages of Underground 2, namely, that in a world where our choices are limited to the homogenizing consumerist System of Japan, Inc., or the likes of Asahara Shōkō, in order to find meaning in life, we do ourselves a disservice indulging in oversimplified oppositions of “us versus them”; rather, there are benefits to be found in the recognition that there may be those in our world who really do “hear the voices,” who are not mental cases, and sometimes they should be listened to. And where, finally, are these “voices” to be found in the actual world in which we live? Here, too, I think we could substitute “inner narrative” for “voices” and have a clearer idea of what Murakami has been trying to accomplish as a writer all these years. From his most bizarrely magical realist fiction to his most realistically grounded nonfiction, he has tried again and again to demonstrate to his readers the importance of looking within themselves, engaging their own inner “voices,” and using these to perceive and remake the world that surrounds them.

This chapter—indeed, this book—began with the assertion that concepts like “truth,” “fact,” and even “reality,” grounded as they are in the snares of individual perception, filtered through the imperfect tool of language and culture, are to be viewed with skepticism. I have not sought to suggest that the world around us does not exist, so much as to suggest that it cannot exist meaningfully without first passing through the various filters of our perception apparatuses. If this is true, then it becomes ever more important for each individual to examine and explore the unique apparatus with which he or she perceives and reconstructs the world and its various events. This is why genres like literary journalism and journalistic fiction are so useful, for they acknowledge the constitutive role of language, of our internal narrative, in the production of the external narratives we project into and share with the rest of the world. It is Kanda Miyuki’s acute awareness of and connection to a strong internal narrative that Murakami responds to so powerfully; it is the lack of such narratives that seems to link so many other Aum Shinrikyō members with whom he spoke as he compiled Underground 2. A great many of these people admired Asahara Shōkō and his upper echelon—particularly Jōyū Fumihiro—for their ability to respond with great precision and certainty to their questions; yet, one can hear Murakami asking implicitly—and at times, almost explicitly—how can anyone answer questions about the “other world,” about our purpose and place in the world, about existence itself, with precision or certainty? Are these not the very things every individual must discover for himself? The greatest flaw Murakami identifies in the Aum Shinrikyō, then, is that it gives its members answers to intensely personal questions that can only truly be approached from the inside, through our own individual narrative. Ultimately, cults like the Aum Shinrikyō behave much as the homogenizing state or “System”: they supply an overarching narrative of the world, how it works, what its values are, what it means to be successful, happy, enlightened, and they present that narrative to their members, fait accompli, as an inalienable truth. Rat expresses this central theme at the outset of Hear the Wind Sing when he complains that “thinking your way through fifty years, truth be told, is a lot more tiring than spacing out for five thousand years.”52 Today, more than three decades after writing that line, Murakami continues to pit the empty bliss of blind conformity against the greater challenges—but also greater rewards—of maintaining an individual stance toward the world, accepting our imperfections, thinking for ourselves, connecting with our inner narrative, and finally deciding on our own what the world is, what it means for us, and what our role in it should be.

Connecting 1Q84 to the actual development of the Aum Shinrikyō cult, then, exposes more clearly how this novel brings Murakami’s most important original theme up to date, a theme whose mode of expression has changed a great deal in three decades but whose essential message has not. What have we seen in 1Q84 but a plea from the author to make up our own minds? To think for ourselves? Tengo and Aomame both emerge as heroes in this novel, but only after they determine of their own free will to break away from the tasks that have been set them, tasks that, they are told, are morally right and correct; it is only when both strike out on their own and choose for themselves that they are able to shake off the delusion of predetermined fate and begin to fulfill a destiny that, both actually and figuratively, they are in the process of writing themselves. At the same time, Murakami presents the Sakigake cult to us not as a monolith of “evil” but as individuals seeking answers to life’s questions. Some of them have the gifts required to “hear the voices,” to gain the wisdom of the gods, but most can only await that wisdom, perhaps never realizing that the means to discovering it already exists within themselves, in their own narrative. In the context of our discussion of journalistic fiction, Murakami’s voice seems to urge us as readers to take each character as he or she appears, to judge for ourselves their guilt or innocence, their good or evil, based not on loaded terms like cult but on what we see occurring in the story. And finally, if we listen carefully, we may even hear Murakami’s own “voice,” whispering to us, reminding us that the realities we find in the novel are not, finally, so different from the realities we find in the real world. The most important thing is to judge for ourselves, against the inner narrative we carry, for only in this manner can we truly grasp what radio journalist Paul Harvey (1918–2009) used to call “the rest of the story.”