[Extract from ‘Underground’, by Haruki Murakami, pages 197-203.]

2 Why Did I Look Away from the Aum Cult?

What alternative is there to the media's "Us" versus "Them"? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this "righteous" position of "ours" all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the "dirty" distortions in "their" thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy.

A little while after the events, a thought occurred to me. In order to understand the reality of the Tokyo gas attack, no study of the rationale and workings of "them", the people who instigated it, would be enough. Necessary and beneficial though such efforts might be, wasn't there a similar need for a parallel analysis of "us"? Wasn't the real key (or part of a key) to the mystery thrust upon Japan by "them" more likely to be found hidden under "our" territory.

We will get nowhere as long as the Japanese continue to disown the Aum "phenomenon" as something completely other, an alien presence viewed through binoculars on the far shore. Unpleasant though the prospect might seem, it is important that we incorporate "them", to some extent, within that construct called "us", or at least within Japanese society. Certainly that is how the event was viewed from abroad. But even more to the point, by failing to look for the key buried under our own feet, where it might be visible to the naked eye, by holding the phenomenon at such a distance we are in danger of reducing its significance to a microscopic level.

This thought has a history. I trace it back to February 1990, when Aum stood for election in the Lower House of the Japanese Diet. Asahara was running in Shibuya Ward, the Tokyo district where I was living at the time, and the campaign was a singularly odd piece of theatre. Day after day strange music played from big lorries with sound-systems, while white-robed young men and women in oversized Asahara masks and elephant heads lined the pavement outside my local train station, waving and dancing some incomprehensible jig.

When I saw this election campaign, my first reaction was to look away. It was one of the last things I wanted to see. Others around me showed the same response: they simply walked by pretending not to see the cultists. I felt an unnameable dread, a disgust beyond my understanding. I didn't bother to consider very deeply where this dread came from, or why it was "one of the last things I wanted to see". I didn't think it was all that important at the time. I simply put the image out of mind as "nothing to do with me".  

Faced by the same scene, no doubt 90 per cent of people would have felt and behaved the same way: walk by pretending not to see; don't give it a second thought; forget it. Very likely German intellectuals during the Weimar period behaved in a similar fashion when they first saw Hitler.

But now, thinking back on it, the whole thing seems very curious. There are any number of new religions out there proselytizing on the street, yet they don't fill us - or at least me - with an inexplicable dread. No, it's just "Oh, them again", and that's it. If you want to talk aberrations, then shaven-headed Japanese youths dancing around chanting "Hare Krishna" are a departure from the social norm. Still, I don't look away from Hare Krishnas. Why, then, did I automatically avert my eyes from the Aum campaigners? What was it that disturbed me?

My conjecture is this. The Aum "phenomenon" disturbs precisely because it is not someone else's affair. It shows us a distorted image of ourselves in a manner none of us could have foreseen. The Hare Krishnas and all the other new religions can be dismissed at the outset (before they even enter into our rational mind) as having no bearing on us. But not Aum, for some reason. Their presence - their appearance, their song - had to be actively rejected by an effort of will, and that is why they disturb us.

Psychologically speaking (I'll only wheel out the amateur psychology just this once, so bear with me), encounters that call up strong physical disgust or revulsion are often in fact projections of our own faults and weaknesses. Very well, but how does this relate to the feeling of dread I felt in front of the train station? No, I'm not saying "There but for the grace of - whatever - go I. Under different circum-stances, you and I might have joined the Aum cult and released sarin gas in the subway." That doesn't make any sense realistically (or logistically). All I mean to say is that something in that encounter, in their presence, must also have been present in us to necessitate such active conscious rejection. Or rather, "they" are the mirror of "us"!

Now of course a mirror image is always darker and distorted. Convex and concave swap places, falsehood wins out over reality, light and shadow play tricks. But take away these dark flaws and the two images are uncannily similar; some details almost seem to conspire together. Which is why we avoid looking directly at the image, why, consciously or not, we keep eliminating these dark elements from the face we want to see. These subconscious shadows are an "underground" that we carry around within us, and the bitter aftertaste that continues to plague us long after the Tokyo gas attack comes seeping out from below.

3 The Handed-down Self: the Allocated Narrative

To quote from the Unabomber's manifesto, published in the New York Times in 1995:

The system reorganizes itself so as to put pressure on those who do not fit in. Those who do not fit into the system are "sick"; to make them fit in is to "cure". Thus, the power process aimed at attaining autonomy is broken and the individual is subsumed into the other-dependent power process enforced by the system. To pursue autonomy is seen as "disease".'

* The document that became known as the Unabomber's manifesto was sent to the New York Times and the Washington Post in April 1995 by a person called "FC"; identified by the FBI as the Unabomber and implicated in 3 murders and 16 bombings. The author threatened to send a bomb to an unspecified destination "with intent to kill" unless one of the newspapers published this manuscript, entitled "Industrial Society and Its Future". The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI recom-mended publication and it appeared in a special supplement in both papers in September 1995. This led David Kaczynski to draw a comparison between the Unabomber and his estranged brother Theodore, who was arrested in April 1996. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1998. [Tr.}

Interestingly enough while the Unabomber's modus operandi almost exactly parallels Aum's (when, for instance, they sent a parcel bomb to Tokyo City Hall), Theodore Kaczynski's thinking is even more closely linked to the essence of the Aum cult.

The argument Kaczynski puts forward is fundamentally quite right. Many parts of the social system in which we belong and function do indeed aim at repressing the attainment of individual autonomy, or, as the Japanese adage goes: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."

From the perspective of the Aum followers, just as they were asserting their own autonomy, society and the State came down on top of them, pronouncing them an "anti-social movement", a "cancer" to be cut out. Which is why they became more and more anti-social.

Nonetheless, Kaczynski - intentionally or unintentionally- overlooked one impor-tant factor. Autonomy is only the mirror image of dependence on others. If you were left as a baby on a deserted island, you would have no notion of what "auton-omy" means. Autonomy and dependency are like light and shade, caught in the pull of each other's gravity, until, after considerable trial and error, each individual can find his or her own place in the world.

Those who fail to achieve this balance, like Shoko Asahara perhaps, have to compensate by establishing a limited (but actually quite effective) system. I have no way of ranking him as a religious figure. How does one measure such things? Still, a cursory look at his life does suggest one possible scenario. Efforts to over-come his own individual disabilities left him trapped inside a closed circuit. A genie in a bottle labelled "religion", which he proceeded to market as a form of shared experience.

Asahara surely put himself through hell, a horrific bloodbath of internal conflicts and soul-searching until he finally arrived at a systematization of his vision. Undoubtedly he also had his satori, some "attainment of paranormal value". Without any first-hand experience of hell or extraordinary inversion of everyday values, Asahara would not have had such a strong, charismatic power. From a certain perspective, primitive religion always carries its own associated special aura that emanates from some psychic aberration.

In order to take on the "self-determination" that Asahara provided, most of those who took refuge in the Aum cult appear to have deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood - lock and key - in that "spiritual bank called Shoko Asahara. The faithful relinquished their freedom, renounced their possessions, disowned their families, discarded all secular judgement (common sense). "Normal" Japanese were aghast: How could anyone do such an insane thing? But conversely, to the cultists it was probably quite comforting. At last they had someone to watch over them, sparing them the anxiety of confronting each new situation on their own, and delivering them from any need to think for themselves.

By tuning in, by merging themselves with Shoko Asahara's "greater, more pro-foundly unbalanced" Self, they attained a kind of pseudo self-determination. Instead of launching an assault on society as individuals, they handed over the entire strategic responsibility to Asahara. We'll have one "Self-power versus the system" set-menu, please.

Theirs was not Kaczynski's "battle against the system to attain the power process of self-determination". The only one fighting was Shoko Asahara: most followers were merely swallowed up and assimilated by his battle-hungry ego. Nor were the followers unilaterally subjected to Asahara's "mind control". Not passive victims: they themselves actively sought to be controlled by Asahara. "Mind control" is not something that can be pursued or bestowed just like that. It's a two-sided affair.

If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself, they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.

Now a narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.

Yet without a proper ego, nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there?

At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back instead is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that other ego.

Just what kind of narrative?

 It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, rather the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios - they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their self-identity.

A simple "emblem" of a story will do for this sort of narrative, the same way that a war medal bestowed on a soldier doesn't have to be pure gold. It's enough that the medal be backed up by a shared recognition that "this is a medal", no matter that it's a cheap tin trinket.

Shoko Asahara was talented enough to impose his rehashed narrative on people (who for the most part came looking for just that). It was a risible, slap-dash story. To unbelievers it could only be regurgitated tripe. Still, in all fairness, it must be said that a certain consistency runs through it all. It was a call to arms.

From this perspective, in a limited sense, Asahara was a master storyteller who proved capable of anticipating the mood of the times. He was not deterred by the knowledge, whether conscious or not, that his ideas and images were recycled junk. Asahara deliberately cobbled together bits and pieces from all around him (the way that Spielberg's ET assembles a device for communicating with his home planet out of odds and ends in the family garage) and brought to them a singular flow, a current that darkly reflected the inner ghosts of his own mind. Whatever the deficiencies in that narrative, they were in Asahara himself, so they presented no obstacle to those who chose to merge themselves with him. If anything, these deficiencies were a positive bonus, until they became fatally polluted. Irredeemably delusional and paranoiac, a new pretext developed, grand and irrational, until there was no turning back ...

Such was the narrative offered by Aum, by "their" side. Stupid, you might say. And surely it is. Most of us laughed at the absurd off-the-wall scenario that Asahara provided. We laughed at him for concocting such "utter nonsense" and we ridiculed the believers who could be attracted to such "lunatic-fodder". The laugh left a bitter aftertaste in our mouths, but we laughed out loud all the same. Which was only to be expected.

But were we able to offer "them" a more viable narrative? Did we have a narrative potent enough to chase away Asahara's "utter nonsense?"

That was the big task. I am a novelist, and as we all know a novelist is someone who works with "narratives", who spins "stories" professionally. Which meant to me that the task at hand was like a gigantic sword dangling above my head. It's something I'm going to have to deal with much more seriously from here on. I know I'm going to have to construct a "cosmic communication device" of my own. I'll probably have to piece together every last scrap of junk, every weakness, every deficiency inside me to do it. (There, I've gone and said it - but the real surprise is that it's exactly what I've been trying to do as a writer all along!)

So then, what about you? (I'm using the second person, but of course that includes me.)

Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or some thing), and taken on a "narrative" in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of "insanity"? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares?