Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

BECAUSE JAPAN SEEMS TO BE a world of order and decency and restraint, a book evoking Japanese chaos and rage is like a glimpse of the dark side, the insecurity that lies underground. That book, Andaguraundo, by Haruki Murakami, is about the 1995 poison gas outrage on the Tokyo subway. Murakami wrote, "Another personal motive for my interest in the Tokyo gas attack is that it took place underground. Subterranean worlds—wells, underpasses, caves, underground springs and rivers, dark alleys, subways—have always fascinated me and are an important motif in my novels. The image, the mere idea of a hidden pathway, immediately fills my head with stories."

The sarin attack on morning commuters, Murakami has written, was a defining moment in postwar Japanese history, blunt-force trauma to the national psyche. The attack was perpetrated by members of a quasi-Buddhist cult called Aum Shinrikyo, whose guru, a half-blind paranoiac named Shoko Asahara, had turned his believers into commandos. One day, ten of them slipped into the Tokyo subway and punctured sealed packets of the poison on eight trains rolling through the system. One pinprick of sarin is lethal to a human. Twelve people died, thousands were injured, some permanently. All at once Japanese order was violated and the nation made to feel insecure.

Murakami saw it as a seismic event, like the Kobe earthquake the same year. "Both were nightmarish eruptions beneath our feet—from underground." Thus the title of his book, Underground, a chronicle of the sarin attack that was like "one massive explosion." It tells the stories of many of the people involved: the victims, the cultists, the bystanders. He said he wrote the book because he had lived so many years abroad and "I have always wanted to understand Japan at a deeper level."

I did too. That was why I read the book, and it was also why I wanted to see Haruki Murakami in Tokyo. Such a thoughtful man would be the best guide, and seeing him here would also be a way for me to connect in this city of strangers.

Japanese tend not to talk about failure, or to question the system, or to refuse to join the company, or to sit around whistling Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy" or "Crepuscule with Nellie," or to go into self-imposed exile. Haruki Murakami has lived his life as the opposite of a salaryman, following these forbidden ways, and yet this compact, exceedingly healthy man seemed to me (depending on what he was saying at the time) both the most Japanese and the least Japanese person I had ever met. A healthy writer is an oxymoron. Yet Murakami has run twenty-nine marathons and competed in numerous triathlons. One long day he ran a 100-kilometer race. This took him eleven and a half hours.

"You ran sixty-five miles?" I asked. "How did you feel the next day?"

When he smiles, which is not often, Murakami has a cherubic face. He smiled and said, "I didn't feel too bad."

He did not advertise this feat, nor did he go on book tours in Japan. He was so averse to publicity that he had never appeared on Japanese TV or in bookstores, gave no lectures, did no signings, hardly surfaced in Japan at all—though he had taught in the United States, at Harvard and Princeton, and sometimes promoted his books there. But he did not wish his face to be recognizable in Japan.

Another un-Japanese aspect of Murakami's career is that he has chosen to live a large proportion of his adult life outside Japan, in Greece and Italy and the United States (where I first met him). He returns to Japan at intervals to spend time at his house in Oisu, where one of his recreations is playing American jazz records from his collection of six thousand, all vinyl. He is especially Japanese in this respect, in a nation where pastimes or beliefs become consuming passions—whether it is jazz, Thomas Hardy, Elvis, the ukulele, or designer labels. Christianity became such a national craze in Japan in the seventeenth century, with mass conversions and baptisms, that the shogun outlawed the religion. Instead of surrendering, the Christian Japanese chose martyrdom, the subject of Shusaku Endo's somber novel Silence.

I got in touch with Murakami. He is the most reclusive writer I know, also the most energetic, and with a lively mind. You would almost take him to be normal. He rises every day at four A.M. ("it used to be five") to begin his day's stint and writes until midmorning; he spends the rest of the day doing whatever he likes, usually running. After ten in the morning he'll shrug and say, "I've done my day's work."